


Immortality

by thedevilchicken



Category: The Picture of Dorian Gray - Oscar Wilde, Van Helsing (2004)
Genre: Crossover, Crossover Pairings, M/M, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2004-05-16
Updated: 2005-07-11
Packaged: 2018-04-05 15:02:08
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 27
Words: 52,821
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4184277
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thedevilchicken/pseuds/thedevilchicken
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Gabriel learns he has a brother and with the assistance of the mysterious Dorian Gray, sets out across Europe to find him.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. His Brother's Letter

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted to Livejournal starting 16 May 2004 and ending 11 July 2005.
> 
> I pictured Dorian as Stuart Townsend in the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen movie, but you don't need to have seen the film (or read the graphic novel) to get the crossover!

It was raining when he arrived in London, streaming from the dreary, ash-grey sky almost as a single icy sheet. Van Helsing stepped down from the carriage and out onto the street; he paid the driver generously with what little money he had, out of sheer pity. Van Helsing may have been dressed in his impenetrable leathers, but the poor scrawny excuse for a man shivering up there at the reins of the horses was clearly soaked down to the skin. 

"Thank you, sir!" said the driver, grinning widely from under his broad, sopping hat as he counted the silver that crossed his palm. Van Helsing nodded and tipped his own hat; a sodden lady stepped up into the carriage and soon they were parted, heading in quite opposite directions. 

He didn't mind the rainwater running over the brim of his hat or the heavy torrent that drummed against his shoulders as he walked. There was the rough equivalent of a river running down the street that flowed around his boots and chilled his feet a little, but he was used to British weather. Still, he strode quickly down the street, passed by the numerous coaches and carriages of central London, letting the rain wash away the last of the Transylvanian mud from his trench coat. He looked forward to resting his bones in his own bed for the first time in months. 

He turned left into a private little square and jogged up the six or seven shallow steps to the black front door. Shifting his small leather bag to his other hand, he knocked; he didn't expect to wait long for an answer, huddled close to the house's whitewashed façade to keep well away from the gutter's torrential overspill, and he didn't wait long. A butler dressed all in black answered the door and let him inside. 

Not that Taylor had ever shown even the remotest sign of emotion, but Van Helsing's sudden reappearance out of the jarring rainstorm didn't quite seem news to him. He stood there, regal as a king, as he watched the water drip steadily from the hems of Van Helsing's leather trench coat and pool on the chessboard tiles of the entrance hall. 

"You are soaking wet, sir," said Taylor, who had always possessed a certain flair for stating the patently obvious. "Shall I take your coat?" Van Helsing had pulled it off and folded it haphazardly in half before Taylor had the chance to move to assist him. "Would the master care for a pot of tea?" he asked, taking the coat and refolding it neatly over his arm as he did so, despite the fact that it was still dripping wet. 

Van Helsing nodded somewhat distractedly, finding that his boots had leaked and that this had somehow escaped his notice whilst walking from the carriage. "I'll change and take it in the library."

"Very good, sir," said Taylor, expertly wheedling the travel bag from Van Helsing's hand almost without him realising it. "Ah, sir: there is a gentleman waiting for you in the library. I explained to him that you were not at home - possibly not in the country - and yet he seemed most insistent that you would return today and that he must wait for you. I admit I did not see the harm in admitting him to the library."

Van Helsing nodded, with a slight tired frown. "Very good, Taylor," he said, stepping toward the front staircase and leaving a faint trail of watery footprints on the tiled floor. "Tell the gentleman I'll be with him shortly." He saw Taylor's nod only from the corner of his eye as he mounted the stairs and disappeared swiftly to the first floor. As he went, his eyes strayed over the painting-covered walls; he bobbed up quickly past landscapes and portraits of all shapes and sizes, intense, vibrant colours, pictures of beautiful faces that he didn't quite know. And, of course, he passed that one empty space for whose presence he had never accounted, with its patch of perfect wallpaper almost completely free from fading. He thought about it with regularity that approached obsession on occasion, almost sure it held some clue to his forgotten past, but for the moment he didn't feel he had the luxury of time. 

He opened the double doors that led through into his bedroom and stepped inside dripping with somewhat reduced intensity on the plain sheepskin rug by the foot of the bed. He found a suit laid out for him, neatly pressed, and wasn't sure if he felt he should thank or damn Taylor for it; to be honest he felt like some form of impostor when he ventured out of his leathers and put on a suit, despite the fine fabric and the excellent tailoring. He felt the cuffs and necktie chafed and he preferred his high boots to the shoes he assumed were high fashion. But he changed out of his comfortable if now slightly malodorous clothes and into the suit, feeling awkward as his fingers fumbled with the small buttons. 

In fact, he felt awkward not only in that suit but in that house. It was overly large for just one man, even if he did apparently keep a manservant, and the décor wasn't at all what he would have chosen, all paintings and tapestries and small decorative items that that littered the shelves in the lounge. At least he assumed that it wasn't his choosing, though a bishop, three neighbours and his servant all seemed to believe that it was. Down to the last Louis Quatorze dresser and chased silver-framed mirror. 

The house, a section of terrace that ran down one side of a secluded London square, did apparently belong to him; the deeds were in his name though he didn't recognise the hand in which he'd signed them, and he did have to admit that even aside from the clothes which were perfectly his size, there was an air of something quite familiar about the place. Still, though he did reluctantly refer to the place as home, he distrusted all testimony to the fact that it was his. Familiar as the house did feel, there was also a subtle yet disquieting undercurrent that told him there was something not quite right. He found, though, that he had little choice but to play along until he remembered for himself. 

Perhaps it was the complete lack of any item personally and recognisably his own that bothered him so. That, and much more recently a visitor waiting in the library who had precipitated his return. He changed, fiddled with his necktie that he never could get to lie just so and then went downstairs, past the paintings and the lack thereof.

There were heavy wooden doors leading into the library, and he resisted the urge to push them both open for a somewhat grand and dramatic entrance. Instead he turned the cold brass knob of the right hand door and let himself in quietly. There was a pot of tea and two teacups resting on the low table by the fire that was roaring in the hearth, between the two deep green leather chairs. The left chair, though high-backed and facing the fireplace that lay almost directly opposite where he currently stood by the door, he could tell was occupied; a hand bearing two silver rings lay on the chair arm, the fingers of his as yet mysterious guest drumming at a constant tempo on the old and slightly tarnished leather. 

"Have you been waiting long?" he asked, curtly, backing into the door to close it behind him before walking toward the fireplace, the empty chair, the tea and his guest. It was not a particularly large room though the ceiling rose quite high above him and the walls were lined for the most part with books that he didn't remember having read. He'd tried a few, on the odd occasion when he found himself staying there, and had so far found only texts on precious stones and medicine, the odd volume of philosophy and one or two works of French poetry. He was almost sure that he didn't read French, though he seemed to speak it well enough. 

"No," said the man in the chair, as it was definitely a man's voice and Taylor had, after all, told him that his caller was a gentleman. "No, not long." It was a deep voice, with a little age and gravel to it, perhaps a little weary. "Three hours, or four, I believe." And there was also an accent. Not thick but quite pronounced despite the clear diction and stiff formality of his English. He was, perhaps, surprised to hear it; since learning of the gentleman's presence he had half-assumed that it must be some priest or other, from a list of names as long as his arm that he didn't care to recall; some of those priests were not English - the majority were not, in fact - but if they did come from outside of England they were invariably French, Italian, Spanish. This accent was entirely different. 

He took a seat in the empty leather chair to his right, fiddling momentarily with the cuffs of his smart grey suit, ignoring all courtesy by not offering his hand. It wasn't a conscious slight - he quite simply forgot it, and often. Then he turned to meet his guest. 

"Herr Van Helsing," said the man, leaning forward in his seat and proffering one white-gloved hand with its rings so incongruously worn on top. "It is an honour. I am Klaus Van Varenberg. I hope you do not find my waiting here for you impertinent."

He wanted to say that he did, that all he had wanted to do was strip off his clothes and bury himself in the clean, heavy dress of his bed, but he forced a civil look to his face. "No, not at all," he said instead, leaning forward to shake Van Varenberg's hand briefly before leaning back into his chair. "But why exactly are you here?"

"Ah, straight to the point, Herr Van Helsing," said Van Varenberg, with the ghost of a smile playing at his broad, creased mouth. From the short grey hair combed back neatly from his forehead and the wrinkles on his distinguished face, Van Helsing guessed the man was close to sixty. He clutched the brim of his hat in his hands, pressing at it with a kind of nervous energy that as yet Van Helsing did not understand. "I am here on behalf of your brother, Herr Doktor Abraham Van Helsing."

For a second his heart leapt in his chest, but then it settled with a sickening lurch and left him with a feeling of empty suspicion. Icy, clammy fingers crawled his skin beneath that fine grey suit. "I don't have a brother," he said, at last, enunciating clearly lest there lie any uncertainty in his almost unwelcome visitor’s seemingly clear English. 

Van Varenberg dropped his black hat onto his knees and wiped his gloved hands down over his thighs. He nodded briefly, but seemingly to himself. "But you do, indeed," he said, his own enunciation startlingly clear, as clear as the gaze that he cast over the low table and its long-forgotten tea now cooling in the bone china cups. "The Doktor said that there would perhaps be some confusion, due to the condition of your memory, but that I was to convey to you the fact that you have, indeed, a brother: Herr Doktor Abraham Van Helsing." Van Varenberg stopped, then frowned, before his hands flitted over his slightly ill-fitting jacket; Van Helsing found it troubling that he had begun to understand the logistics of a well-fitted jacket, and was, for a moment, distracted by this curiously appalling revelation. But then Van Varenberg produced from within his inside pocket a plain white paper envelope, slightly crumpled. 

He reached out and took the envelope; he turned it over and found on the front his name, Gabriel, in a deft yet spidery hand. It seemed curiously familiar. "From my brother?" he asked, his gaze concentrated exclusively on the spiky black-inked letters of his Christian name, though the word ‘brother’ seemed an ill fit in his mouth. 

"Yes, certainly," replied Van Varenberg in his low voice. "It was chiefly to convey this note that I have come. Or was, rather, sent." Van Helsing ran the callused pad of his right index finger over the ink of his name. "And now that I have performed the task that was demanded of me, I must retire." 

Van Varenberg hefted himself from the chair; he had obviously waited there for some long hours as his knees cracked soundly in a manner not unlike a muffled pistol shot. He made for the door and Van Helsing sprang to his feet. 

"You won't wait for a reply?" he asked; the man, now seeming almost ten years older, turned and shook his head. He seemed all skin and bone and frailty, and Van Helsing almost went to him, to help him to the door. He stood his ground. 

"No, I must return to my hotel," Van Varenberg said, with a weary sigh. "I shall be at the Traveller's Rest Inn in Charlotte Street if you should need me before morning; however, after eight or nine I fear I shall be unavailable to you."

Van Helsing nodded, strangely contented with those words, and then strode up to the door to open if before his now departing guest. He opened both doors with an inexplicable flourish as if to give a kind of unnecessarily grand farewell, then called to Taylor for Herr Van Varenberg's coat. The frail old man seemed to decline the pseudo-pomp of his goodbye and slipped out into the bitter, biting rain as though little more than a whisper. Before five minutes had passed, there seemed little more proof that he had ever come than an extra teacup on the table and a plain white envelope bearing the name 'Gabriel.' 

The envelope: it seemed strange, but he had almost forgotten it, though it was still in his hand. He passed back through into the library and sat down by the fire, remembering the paper knife too late as he ripped it open. It had a seal of thick red wax stamped with a sword and a snake - how had he not noticed before that the seal was the image of his ring? He frowned but didn't dwell on the thought; he pulled the contents from the envelope, one single folded piece of plain white paper. Telling himself there was no reason for him to dread as he did so inexplicably, he unfolded the paper. 

Across it ranged that same strangely familiar hand in its black ink, all thin spikes and angles. It read simply:  


> Gabriel,
> 
> Brother, it's time. 
> 
> Paris, January 17, the ball of the Countess Dupré. You will require no invitation. Dress for the masquerade. 
> 
> Soon, 
> 
> Abraham

It was a strange sort of letter with no hint of a return address any clearer than 'Paris' hidden in its utterly confounding lines. It was, though, thoroughly compelling, and even then Van Helsing knew that come January 17 he would be there in Paris, whether or not the mysterious carrier Van-- but his name had faded, and that troubled him, as had the evening as a whole. 

He had not slept in almost two days; his troubling thoughts would wait for the morning. He slipped the note into its torn envelope and stepped onto the stairs. He stripped and plunged naked into his soft feather bed, the letter on the dresser where he was sure to see it when he woke. And then he fell to blissful, dreamless sleep.


	2. The Forgettable Man

He woke to the cawing of a crow outside his window and slipped out from the warmth of his bed to the frigid morning air. The room was full of cold light, touching him and the things he was assured were his all around him from between the open curtains he was sure that he'd closed. Something bothered him and that in itself was bothering; he considered long and dreamless nights a blessing and woke refreshed, but that morning he felt somehow different. He plucked his thick dressing gown from the stool by the dresser and tugged it on over his shoulders, tying the belt tightly around his waist. When he faced the window it seemed that the crow was looking in on him. 

Taylor had clearly never understood his master's odd compulsion to grab whatever food happened to be closest to hand and wolf it down for breakfast. That morning was no different; he stood by, hovering at Van Helsing's elbow as he made his way through several slices of cold cooked meat and two peaches. Then he whisked himself away upstairs to wash and dress in another fine but equally irksome suit. He prodded at his necktie until he was sure he was losing his mind, then pulled on his heavy woollen overcoat and a hat. 

It was a top hat. Charcoal grey to compliment his suit and coat and making him feel like a prize fool despite the fact that every other male pedestrian he saw after leaving the house seemed to be dressed in a rather similar fashion. Not, of course, that knowing that served to comfort him in any great or sweeping manner; it rather made him feel even more the fool for his conformity. 

He hailed a carriage and gave the driver the address of the Traveller's Rest. He could have walked the whole way if it hadn't been for that suit and his accursed shoes; he swore to himself under his breath that no matter what Society might say, he was not wearing such decorative, impractical shoes again. He had a strange though admittedly understandable yearning for his old boots. To hell with suffering for style. 

They sky was dull grey-white and overcast as he stepped out to the street outside the hotel; he paid the driver who left him immediately and pushed open the door with one gloved hand. Holding his hat in both hands and feeling oddly conspicuous, he asked after a man, an old man, of indeterminate height and build and who might have been younger or older than sixty - a man who was thoroughly forgettable. With a quick glance at the register the clerk knew him at once - the gentleman in question was Mr. Klaus Van Varenberg. 

Soon he was on the second floor landing, knocking with remarkable insistency upon the door of the said Mr. Klaus Van Varenberg, whose name had once already seeped from his memory and from which he felt his hold was already slipping once again. He ceased his knocking for a moment to scrawl the name on the reverse of the envelope containing the letter from his alleged brother. Then he resumed knocking. 

But there was no answer. He called out 'Van Varenberg!' three or four times, until the next door on the right opened to permit the rudely awakened resident to complain at him rather stridently. When the man had retreated, Van Helsing forced the door. It made considerably less noise than his knocking had. 

The room was small and simple and though in lesser hands than its current owners it may have lapsed into shabbiness, it was neat and well presented for the cell-away-from-home that it was. The bed was still made. There was an untouched plate of some substance which at one point may indeed have been edible sitting beside a poured but otherwise untouched cup of tea. A fresh set of clothes was laid out over the small armchair by the bed. The single space in the room that Van Helsing couldn't see was behind the old lacquered screen in front of the window; he moved slowly toward it. 

For one sick second he wished that he had a gun, his pistol, as he dreaded what he'd see behind that screen, but all he had were his fists and the closest thing to deadly there about his person was his torturous footwear. He took a breath and rounded the edge of the screen. 

Klaus Van Varenberg was dead. He had no need to reach out for his cold body to confirm this as he did because there was no sleep among the living that could have mimicked that of the old man. He sagged forward in his armchair, his chin resting down against his chest; he was still dressed in the suit that he'd worn to see Van Helsing, but the man himself inside it, resting, then looked older still. But there was peace in him, and that at least was a relief to see. 

He turned away and rubbed his eyes; when he turned back he realised that his name was gone again and most of the memory of his face. There was a moment of panic, when he wondered, _believed_ almost, that his whole memory was fading, but he could still recall the exact shape of Anna's face when he tried to and that served to calm. It was just this man, somehow, that slipped from his memory, dissipated like a drop of blood in a fountain. In a few hours he wouldn't remember him. He had no idea why, and now that he was dead there could be no explanation sought. It only strengthened his resolve to leave for Paris. 

As he leant back against the wall of the small room, watching the light from the window play on the face of the dead man, feeling the collar of his shirt suddenly becoming far too tight, he decided to remember. Not the man - that much seemed to be impossible - but the room and everything in it. He moved through it, touched it, committed it to memory by touch and sight and the slight hint of ashen death that he could taste in the air. He'd remember Van Varenberg by context, if nothing else. This final context. 

And then he left. He slipped unseen from the small hotel by the back staircase, slinked through the alleys until he came far away and felt safe to hail a carriage without implicating himself in the demise - though seemingly natural - of a man who was destined to be forgotten entirely within three hours. By the time he arrived home, all he knew was that in that room had died a man that he'd forgotten, and he must find out why. He felt there were no answers left in London. He had to make for Paris and the masquerade ball of the Countess Dupré. And perhaps while he was there, he would come across this 'brother', this man called Abraham.


	3. In Paris

His only regret in leaving London was that he'd had to go there at all. His home was there, of course, full of his fine and deeply uncharacteristic clothing and fine objets d'art for which he had no time. He was a man of action made to be leather-clad, striding in the dark with a pistol by his breast, not some upper-class public school dandy whose only deep-seated interest lay in the cut of his clothes. He could sometimes pass as such, if it served him to do so and he summoned the requisite effort, but that was surely not his life. He was glad to leave London behind, even though he'd been there less than one single day. He thought perhaps it held bad memories, though he could never be sure. 

He took the train from London, crossed the Channel overnight then carried on by train to Paris. The crossing was choppy and the train quite overcrowded but he didn't seem to mind; he had focus that lifted him above it, strangely above even seasickness. Then the train came to a stop and for a while that concentration, focus, lapsed - he had a feeling that more than one person there in Paris would be more than a little surprised that he'd returned. It was the Henry Jekyll debacle that brought the thought on him, nights of scraping down wanted posters from the walls of all those Paris streets, seeing his face there like some common murderer. 

He left the train and strode on through the station wondering if that was what he was. He hailed a carriage to take him to his hotel. He really had no answer. Perhaps, he thought, it was best that he have no opinion on the matter; he'd leave the world to theirs and let them be his judge as he could apparently not be his own. 

It was during the early evening of January 15th that he arrived, descended from the carriage outside his hotel and stepped onwards through the rather grand front doors. He had rarely travelled with much in the way of means before then, or at least not that he remembered, preferring instead the kind of ascetic poverty that helped foster anonymity; that day he strode into one Paris' better hotels and in his gentleman's attire - and forgiving the boots - he checked into a room. The first thing he did was to devour a whole bowl of fruit and half a bottle of good red wine. The second, he shucked his clothes and left them as they lay, crawling into his bed to sleep through till morning. 

It was 7 o'clock or just after when he woke, oddly refreshed despite a dream that just eluded the very edges of his memory. All that he did remember was darkness and cold, a vague sense of unease and a voice that had wound its way through his mind with all the insidious nature of a sweetly poisonous snake. He found it unsettling, but his dreams often were. 

He ate breakfast in a small, cosy café by the banks of the Seine, at a back table out of the view of the aspiring artists and poets. There was an almost clear view between the posturing clientele and out to the river, reflecting that morning the dull, lifeless grey of a rain-filled sky that seemed to have followed him from London. They had January to thank for the spiritless day, though he almost blamed himself. 

Then, after sipping one last cup of strong black coffee, he left the café to walk. The day was unsurprisingly cold so he drew his thick woollen coat in around him, wishing dearly for the comfort of his battered though sadly conspicuous leather trench. Enamoured of it though he was, he didn't feel that he should pay the price - _dead or alive_ \- for the wearing of it. Perhaps had he not been heading out to Notre Dame he could have chanced it, but to stand there in the muted daylight where Henry Jekyll had died and he had been accused of the murder seemed not just a little foolish. 

He did walk to Notre Dame and he did stand in the spot where Jekyll and Hyde had died, or as close to it as he could find from his dark memories of that night. For a while as he stood he felt like a murderer, even while he reminded himself so clearly and calmly that Hyde had been dangerous, almost a triumph of science over God, and for that also a strange flavour of blasphemy. He didn't feel consoled by the thought of the lives that he'd saved; he stagnated on his questions and self-doubt until startled from his reverie by some new feeling that stirred in him, intrusive. 

It was growing dark; he'd stood there, unmoving, for over an hour and the feeling he felt then was the weight of prying eyes. He was being watched. Of course, when he turned, all he saw were the tourists, goggle-eyed Englishmen staring at the reconstructed Rose Window. As he looked up at it, remembering that night once more, the oppressive weight of those watchful eyes first lifted then was gone. In the crowd, he was alone. 

He made his way back to the hotel and into the dining room, improperly dressed for dinner but it seemed he was paying enough for the staff, if not his fellow guests, to forgive his eccentricity. He ate alone under the magnificent crystal chandeliers that threw glorious refracted light all through the room in a distracting shower of rainbows; despite the picturesque setting it was a sad affair. He had too much time to himself, to brood. Thinking about Jekyll had brought his spirits low so he had thought of Anna and the Valerious curse that he had helped to lift, hoping to buoy his spirits up again. He had only succeeded in bringing himself down still further, to dwell in the bottom of an empty bottle of good red wine that he scarce remembered finishing. 

Sleep, when he'd shed his clothes like a skin and slinked into bed with lips stained red, was not long coming. What dreams may come, he believed that he deserved them.


	4. The Masquerade Ball

As soon as the name _Dupré_ left his lips, the hotel's young and eager concierge was only too happy to give out the address of the Countess' home; it was, apparently, common knowledge to the wealthier residents of the French capital and to those who surrounded them, and so the concierge expressed no particular remorse in passing on the information. Especially as Van Helsing's tip lined his pocket so very well. 

The driver of the carriage that he hailed outside the hotel gave him a small and knowing nod when he spoke the address. It seemed the Countess Dupré was somewhat infamous throughout the city and that news of her masquerade ball had spread quite far and wide. Van Helsing rubbed his fingertips against the breast of his cloak, over the spot where the letter lay in the hidden inside pocket of his high-throated velvet costume. The entire situation felt to him almost like a trap, like an elaborate gilded cage designed with the singular malignant purpose of taking him whole and alive. He was ready and prepared for that eventuality but with his leather-gloved hand pressed down over that letter, he for a moment hoped that all he'd been told could be true. If he did have a brother, perhaps there was a chance for him to come to know even just a fraction of his past. 

He stepped down from the carriage into a busy, jostling street and paid the driver absently and rather too well for the service he’d provided. It was dark out and cold, the air still and biting with the frost that was to come, but still bare-shouldered women left their carriages in flimsy attire barely suited for the summer let alone the height of the Parisian winter. He made his way with all the other new arrivals toward the wide stone steps and the wide-flung doors of the home of the Countess Dupré, tugging down the brim of his hat and pressing his mask into place. As he drew nearer, it seemed that the other guests all clutched small rose-coloured invitations embossed with the countess' distinctive seal; one or two, professing to have misplaced or forgotten their invitations, were turned from the doors by the tall, heavy-set guardsmen who were dressed all in black. Van Helsing began to wonder if this had been a wise choice after all. 

But he remembered the strange letter, its assurance that he would need no invitation. He drew nearer to the door and strangely did not doubt that it was true. 

"Your invitation, monsieur," said the excessively tall guardsman to his right, holding out one gargantuan hand. 

"I don't have an invitation," he replied, looking the man in the eye as best he could from under his hat and his mask. 

"Then I will have to ask you to leave."

"I was told that I wouldn't have need of one."

"Then monsieur was misinformed."

"The note was quite clear."

The giant's expression changed quickly from that of a kind of placid subservience to annoyance. "Everyone must show an invitation," he said, in a lower and slightly more menacing tone. "Even monsieur."

"Unless, of course, monsieur's name is Gabriel Van Helsing."

A butler dressed exactly as Van Helsing knew Taylor would still be back in London stepped up to the door and nodded briefly to both guardsmen. The rising complaints of the queuing guests behind him subsided, and he was at last permitted to enter. The butler disappeared into the throng of party guests before Van Helsing had the chance to question his admittance, but he noted with a private sigh of relief that the letter had been correct; he had not required an invitation, and had not needed to force the point. 

The large entrance hall was filled with guests fighting to check in their coats and wraps; Van Helsing pulled off his cloak and quickly stuffed it down behind an overstuffed leather armchair by the wall before he bypassed the others and weaved his way through the throng into the ballroom. It was a magnificent sight, spacious in the extreme and hung with enormous, ancient tapestries, great chandeliers suspended as if weightless from the lofty heights of the elaborately painted ceiling, done in quite the elegant, if a little ostentatious, reproduction of the Sistine Chapel. The room was filled with streamers and strange coloured lanterns, with a smell of wine and just a touch of unexplained incense. He could hardly hear the playing of the small chamber orchestra for the disaffected chatter and the false laughter from all sides. 

It reminded him, though short on acrobats and founding members of the undead, of another ball. But he shouldn't, wouldn't, think on that. Anna Valerious was dead and gone, scattered to the wind, and he had a man to find. Which, of course, he knew might well prove to be difficult, considering the unfortunate fact that he had not the faintest idea which of the masked men might call himself Doctor Abraham Van Helsing, and the only man that he knew could have helped him was dead and partially forgotten. 

He took a flute of champagne from the silver tray of a passing waiter and retreated to a wall there he sat to sip it in the din and scan the room. The men and women were all elaborately dressed, their costumes of every colour apparent in nature and some that weren’t, and of course all were masked. Even had he known the face of the man for whom he was searching, it would have proved difficult to find amongst that strange collection of masks and variety of costumes. He sipped his champagne and leaned heavily against the wall, a little uncomfortable in his black velvet suit. He had to trust that this Abraham Van Helsing would know how to find him. 

The evening wore on. The music of the orchestra grew more vivacious, almost to the point of fever, as the dancing went on and the temperature rose. Van Helsing tugged at the high collar of his jacket, above its tiny silver buttons, and felt his stomach growl in hungry anger. He left his position slumping in that most unseemly manner and made his way through the chitter-chattering masses to the tables where the food lay. He was on the verge of popping a delicious-looking vol-au-vent into his waiting mouth when he saw her, and promptly lost all appetite. 

She was wearing red, a bright scarlet that caught his eye from the midst of a cluster of black. White gloves stretched to her elbows and she danced with the grace of a princess. A specific princess: Anna Valerious. She turned a little too swiftly in the arms of her partner for him to be sure, but he thought that she resembled Anna in a little more than grace. He felt a sudden chill despite the sweltering heat of the room. It was as if he were in the presence of a ghost. _Her_ ghost. 

But then the dance ended and in the time that it took him to blink, she had merged into the crowd. He searched, his eyes darting madly over the masked faces of the party guests, but he couldn't find her. He was about to move and search for her further as he felt he must, if merely to satisfy his curiosity, but then a new face caught his eyes. That of a man, talking with a small group of others though his eyes were clearly fixed on Van Helsing. 

He looked away, tore his eyes from the staring, gazing stranger and searched again for the girl in the crowd, but it was not long before he felt his eyes drawn back to that stranger. He was now moving toward him, the crowd between them parting as a sea to allow him to pass. The people who moved seemed almost entirely oblivious to their movement, and drew together once again in his wake; he moved between them slowly, almost languorously, his hands tucked neatly in behind his back and his long black cloak brushing against the floor. He wore only a half-mask, a piece of smooth white porcelain that seemed to adhere to the contours of his face through a power of its own. And then he came to a halt, there directly before Van Helsing. 

He was Van Helsing's height exactly and for a moment they looked one another in the eye, and only that. Then, with a strange toss of his long brown hair, the stranger held out his hand; Van Helsing stared at the crisp white glove for a second and then shook the hand. 

"Abraham?" he asked, frowning beneath his mask. 

The stranger seemed oddly amused by this, the one side of his mouth that was visible twisting up in a hint of a smile. He smoothed at half of his trim goatee with one gloved hand a shook his head. 

"Dorian Gray," he said instead, with a smooth, mellow tone and a distinct English accent. Van Helsing felt his stomach sink and strangely longed to turn away but found he could not. There was something about this man that captivated him, held him utterly fascinated; he couldn't tell if it was simply his unnatural good looks, the flow of his limbs beneath his perfectly tailored suit, or if that captivation stemmed more from the feeling he had as his skin crawled. There was something terribly, terribly wrong with this beautiful, compelling man. He felt it, even if he couldn’t see it.

"Gabriel Van Helsing," he said at last and dropped the hand he'd been holding all that time in his almost vice-like grip. 

"I know," said Dorian Gray, the vague smile still playing at his lips and vanishing behind the porcelain mask. "I am acquainted with your brother, Doctor Abraham Van Helsing."

"Ah," he replied. He couldn't say more, though he knew there was more to say. He was somehow, strangely, at a loss for words.

"And we must leave, at once." Van Helsing frowned and Dorian Gray continued as if sensing this uncertainty in him. "You brother had hoped to meet you here tonight, with the masquerade serving to distract any agent that might have followed you from London. Your brother himself was followed, and two days ago was taken captive. Aware of his plan to meet you here, I came to find you in his stead. We should leave, Gabriel. Now."

"How can I trust you?"

"I'm afraid that if you want to find your brother then you simply have no other choice."

Loath though he was to admit it, this Dorian Gray had a point. He wasn't sure that he could trust those brown doe eyes, the beguiling innocence of his face half-seen beneath that operatic mask, despite the apparent lack of any evil that he sensed in him. All he felt was purity of soul, pervasive, blank, _completely blank_ , as though Dorian Gray had never once set even a half-step astray. The feeling should have buoyed him, but instead it left him ill at ease. No one in the world could be so pure.

"You're right," he said. "I have no choice."

Dorian Gray turned to lead the way, but as Van Helsing turned to follow, he hesitated. He glimpsed the girl again, just momentarily, in the arms of a man as he spun across the ballroom dance floor. In that one moment when their eyes met, she seemed to plead with him, and then she was gone. 

A hand touched his arm and he turned with a start; Dorian Gray was frowning at him in vague but apparent concern. 

"What is it?" he asked, low but strangely audible through the din of the hall. 

"Nothing," Van Helsing replied. "It’s nothing. We should leave."


	5. The Doctor's House

The house of Herr Doktor Van Helsing was small and sparsely furnished with one small oil lamp burning in the study, which apparently the man Gabriel now knew as Dorian Gray had left there in anticipation of their return. They descended from the carriage that they had hailed hastily just a few streets from the party of the Countess Dupré, who Van Helsing could not say he regretted missing his opportunity to meet. Dorian Gray had a latchkey, and he let them both inside. 

There was little furniture there inside save the vast bookcases filled with texts that in turn filled the air with the musty, secretive smell of old books. There were no rugs on the scuffed wooden floors and the wallpaper, perhaps once quite exquisite, hung here and there in dank tatters. The stairs creaked awfully beneath their feet and there were no pictures on the walls. The small upstairs bedroom appeared to be the only room in the house in which Abraham had spent any time, being as it was strewn with books and papers, plates with mouldering half-eaten meals and discarded items of well-worn clothing. 

"I don't know where he was taken to," said Dorian suddenly, and Van Helsing looked at him as the dim light from the lamp picked out his face in shadows; even in that shadowed form he seemed quite innocent, somehow free from all airs of the sinister that Van Helsing knew to be present in himself. "There was a carriage waiting by the door; my own had already left when Abraham was brought out and forced inside."

"How many men?" asked Van Helsing, striding over to the desk and leafing briefly through a sheaf of crumpled, aging papers. 

"Two. Tall, broad-shouldered, though they were away so quickly that I didn't have a good view."

Van Helsing sighed and picked up another haphazard sheaf. "Does he have enemies?" he asked. 

"I should assume that you know more than I know, if you could only remember."

"Don’t play games with me, Mr. Gray - you will find I have a short temper."

Dorian smiled, setting his porcelain mask on a table top as he seated himself and crossed his long legs at the knee. "Dorian, please," he said, taking a delicate silver case from his inside jacket pocket and extracting a cigarette. He struck a match that lit up his dark eyes for a moment and he lit the cigarette from it. Van Helsing could hardly believe the man was so calm. 

"Dorian," he said, the name feeling strange on his lips. "Does my brother have enemies?"

"Of course - don't we all?" He inhaled from his cigarette and blew out a plume of thin smoke. "Your brother, however, has more enemies than friends, I'm afraid. He really has the most appalling manners. But I don't know of any enemies he has in Paris. Or, indeed, in France as a whole."

"Then who could have done this?" Van Helsing asked, wrenching open a drawer. 

"There really seems no way to know with any certainty."

"If you had to guess."

Dorian stroked briefly at his goatee as if in contemplation and Van Helsing watched him over the top of a new sheaf of papers; they all seemed to be the same kind of thing - notes on anatomy, biology, sketches of surgical implements. Before Dorian had spoken again, he'd come to the inevitable conclusion that Herr Doktor Van Helsing was a doctor of medicine. 

"I really couldn't say," Dorian said at last. "Though your brother and I are quite intimate friends, this is hardly the general topic of our conversations. Though," and he paused here, as if for effect, "one would assume that if such intense enmity existed, there would exist some form of proof of it."

Van Helsing nodded curtly and rifled through the second drawer, giving himself at least two stinging paper cuts in the process. "Then there should be something here," he said. Dorian inclined his head in agreement, but didn’t move to assist. 

Soon the fevered rifling gave way to a more organised manner of search, and at that point Dorian finally joined him. The two flung off their cloaks and settled into two tattered armchairs, reading through the numerous and varied papers of Abraham Van Helsing by the light of the oil lamp and the few candles that they were able to locate in the sad little dwelling. It all seemed a mingling of unfinished medical texts, letters to and from bankers and lawyers, and anonymous sketches of scenes from a dozen countries or even more. Gabriel recognised the writing from the letter, all in the same spiky hand, but they were getting nowhere. The succeeded only in becoming tired and cold. 

Gabriel wiped at his eyes with the back of his hand, ploughing through a tall stack of papers that he'd found in the bottom of the ramshackle wardrobe. For a second he glanced up at Dorian, who was working through a bundle of scrolls from under the dishevelled bed; his eyes were drawn to him almost inexplicably, watching as he sat there silently reading, his long fingers plucking at the cracking scrolls and from time to time pushing a loose strand of hair back behind his ears. He seemed almost familiar in his gestures, and almost naïve. He was, Gabriel concluded, neither. 

And what a strange friend for his brother he was! Such a man, in his fine clothes, with his fine hands and manners, compared with... suddenly it came on him that aside from the worn clothes and the sorry state of the small house, a name, on a sheet of paper, he had no real basis for comparison. The realisation rankled.

"How old is he?" he asked, from his armchair by the desk. 

"Hmm?" murmured Dorian. "Oh, fifty or so, I should think. He has grey hair, you know, and rather piercing blue eyes. One feels he can see to one's soul."

"He's a good man?"

"Some would say so. Gabriel, do you imagine that this could be of some importance?"

Dorian held out a page and Gabriel took it, feeling some slight unease at Dorian's free use of his Christian name. The paper was on one side an untidy doodle like a map with no names, but on the other was, in Abraham's spidery black hand, albeit something of a scrawl even by his standards, an address. That of Frau Maria Kurtz, in the German city of Berlin. 

"It's the only clue we have," he said, and that was true; so far it was the sum of their findings. And there were simply too many books in the house to check through them all. 

Gabriel folded the sheet and tucked it into his pocket before he hauled himself from the chair with a groan. What exactly happened next was so much the blur that he wasn't sure how it happened; somehow he tripped, went to the floor and took most of the open top desk drawer with him. It split with an almighty cracking of wood and then lay in splinters on the floorboards all around him. And there, lying on his stomach in a muddle of splinters and beside the smaller half of the drawer front, was a book. 

"Well that was certainly unexpected," said Dorian, brushing a few stray splinters from his otherwise pristine suit. "I suppose the drawer had a false bottom. We should have thought of that."

Gabriel sat up with a groan and picked up the book; he pulled himself to his feet and dusted himself off, then turned the book over in his hands. It had gilt edges to the pages and was bound in plain black leather, a plain silver lock on the side holding it shut. He rummaged through the splinters on the floor, hoping that the key might also be there, but all that he found was a heavy silver pocket watch that needed winding. He tucked the watch into his pocket and with a quick glance at Dorian who was watching him quite intently, he forced open the book. 

The pages were faded and yellow as though they belonged to an older volume, and he was almost afraid to touch them they seemed so old. The hand was a thick black calligraphic that, despite the pen and the aging, seemed to bear a remarkable resemblance to that of Abraham Van Helsing. Of course it couldn't be, and he put the thought out of his mind, which became even simpler when he realised that the language must be a medieval form of Latin. It was a pity, he thought, that he didn't speak Latin. Outside the realm of the odd 'requiescat in pace', that was. 

"Do you know Latin?" he asked Dorian as he closed the book with just a faint twinge of guilt over the broken silver lock. 

"I fear I’ve forgotten all I knew of it," came the reply. "And at any rate, my Latin was never precisely of the highest standard."

"I have a friend who can help." He pulled on his cloak in a rather dramatic swirl and tucked the book into his inside pocket, just by the scrawled address. "I'll leave for Germany tomorrow. I appreciate your help, Mr. Gray. Now if you'll excuse me..."

"What time?"

"I'm sorry?"

"What time are you leaving? And my name is Dorian."

"You don't think that you're..."

Dorian smiled. When Dorian smiled his face seemed alive with all the virtues of the God-fearing world; it was a thoroughly magnetic force that tugged at Gabriel’s good sense and brooked no refusal. "I'm going with you, Gabriel," he said, in a tone that almost mocked him for ever having dared to believe otherwise. "I can assure you I have just as much interest in the safe recovery of your brother as you do yourself; perhaps even more so as you can’t even remember his age, let alone much more of him." He stood and pulled on his cloak, picked up his mask from its seat on the table. "And besides, I may be of some use to you. So, what time are you leaving?"

"I'll be setting out by eight o'clock," Gabriel replied, trying to persuade himself that he had not been persuaded by a smile. He told himself that Dorian might yet be of some use. "Meet me at the station, and try to pack light."

Dorian nodded curtly and then they left. They passed by the shelves heavy-laden with books, down to the front door that they slipped through and out into the very early morning. Dorian locked the door behind them and each man vanished his separate way off into the dark.


	6. Maria Kurtz

It was not until the morning, an hour or so after the two men had boarded their train headed east into Germany, that it came to Gabriel to ask about Van Varenberg. Unsurprisingly, Dorian could not place the name, and so he let the conversation, one-sided as it was decidedly to Dorian's advantage, shift to a grand dissection of the arts. 

It seemed that Dorian was in a way an artist - Gabriel had wondered what it was that his unsettling companion really did in life, and aside from presiding over a prodigious fortune handed down to him through his family, he played the piano. He played Chopin nocturnes on his knees as he talked inexhaustibly about the development of the modern piano, about practice, about composition, the art of interpretation and the stirring effects that true, beautiful music could have on the soul of its listener. Gabriel could not remember ever having attended a concert; in fact, the closest he had come to doing so was sitting in on a rehearsal of a cathedral choir once in Rome. He couldn't say that he disliked music, however - he just didn't have the passion for it that some others seemed to. He had always, as far as he knew, been far too occupied in other directions to pay much attention to it. 

The sound of Dorian's voice alone could almost have swayed him. Sitting in their car as the train rattled along, he listened, rapt. Dorian Gray was a truly fascinating man. And how he wished, so many times each hour, that he'd left him back there in Paris. 

They slept that night in their compartment, backs to the wall and feet resting up on their respective seats. The rocking of the train almost made Van Helsing seasick and in the morning he woke feeling queasy, though whether from the train or his nightmares he couldn't tell. He could almost still smell the burning, and glancing over at the opposite seat to find Dorian gazing at him with those curiously disingenuous brown eyes did not serve to help matters. 

They walked down to the dining car, Dorian carrying a curious silver-topped cane that he definitely had not used on either of the nights before, and ate a light breakfast, staring out at the snow-speckled countryside in silence. It was a minor miracle that the lines out of France and into Germany had not been disrupted, though considering the way that Dorian was staring at him, he'd decided that he'd be surprised if both of them made it to Berlin alive. 

They made it to Berlin. It was still relatively early but the streets were still quite busy as they left the station and made an attempt to find a carriage that would take them to Maria Kurtz. The air was almost freezing, turning their noses pink with the cold, and Gabriel stopped to pull his long green scarf from his travel bag. It didn't match his expensive woollen coat or any of his outfit at all, in fact, but he could honestly say that he couldn't have cared less, so long as his throat was kept warm. 

At last, just as he was wondering how long it would take for them to die from the cold, a carriage that they hailed actually slowed and then stopped beside them. Dorian gave the driver the address in rather good German and they stepped up inside. Van Helsing pulled off his flimsy dress gloves and pulled on his thick black leather pair instead. Dorian didn't seem at all bothered by the cold. 

Berlin, as they rode through it, seemed not quite so opulent as either Paris or London. Dorian attempted to make small talk, wondering aloud how Berlin had used to be. Gabriel almost told him but bit back his answer at the last moment; he quite simply could not have known the things he had found himself about to say. Lately it seemed that the lines between his dreams and reality were blurring even more than they had before. 

The address on the page proved to be that of the city's university. Dorian paid the driver and they walked inside; a quick enquiry at the administration office and they found that Maria Kurtz was an assistant to Professor Johannes Volkstein, of their theology department. The helpful clerk also gave the two perfect strangers the number of and directions to her office, which they followed immediately, lugging their travel bags along with them. 

They climbed a winding spiral staircase with a smooth old metal banister polished by years of repeated use, up and up until they reached a floor with three numbered doors. Maria Kurtz's room was numbered 317, the brass figures on the slightly tatty door looking tarnished and dull. Gabriel stepped forward and knocked, the knuckles of his left hand rapping on the door through his leather glove. 

There was a long pause, during which Gabriel felt he almost held his breath, and then a voice called from within, in German that Gabriel was faintly surprised to understand: "I'm busy. Call again later."

Gabriel glanced at Dorian, who shrugged his shoulders; even that small gesture seemed elegant. Then he knocked again, taking off his gloves to knock a little more loudly, with a little more persistence. 

Another pause, heavy and uncomfortable. Then that same female voice called: "I can't see you now. Go away!"

Gabriel was suddenly more glad than alarmed that he’d found he spoke German. "Frau Kurtz?" he called. "We need to speak with you. It's urgent."

But his plea met with silence, stony and unbroken. He glanced again at Dorian, simultaneously annoyed at himself for seeking his approval and annoyed at Dorian for the fact that he was watching him with those wide, appraising eyes. Dorian blinked languidly and leant back against the wall, his cane in his hand and his bag deposited on the scuffed, dusty boards of the floor by his feet. Gabriel tried the door and found it locked. As Gabriel was learning seemed his natural demeanour, Dorian seemed to be vaguely amused by this. 

"Break down the door," he said simply, tilting his head and rubbing absently at his throat with one recently bared hand. "We need to see her."

Gabriel hated to think that he might be following Dorian's orders, but he did break down the door; he braced himself and ran at it from what little distance he could attain in the cramped corridor, and struck it squarely with his right arm and shoulder. The door gave, and Gabriel spilled forward into the room. 

There was a woman, perhaps fifty years old or more, seated at the desk beneath the window, illuminated by what little muted light reflected from her highly polished desktop and surrounded on all sides by shelves and shelves of books. And behind her loomed a great tall man, gaunt and greying, in a coal black suit. He had a gun to Frau Kurtz's temple. 

The first thing that the strange man did was shoot Frau Kurtz, spraying blood and brain and fragments of skull over a bookcase that sat to her left. And then he turned his gun on Gabriel, who, all credit to his almost preternatural reflexes, dived to the floor just in time to avoid being caught somewhere in the torso by a loud pistol shot, which, due to the dive, missed him with acres to spare. He looked up just as the man rounded the edge of the desk, tipping Frau Kurtz's dead form down onto it as he did so. He aimed again, coolly, and Gabriel scrambled for his gun. Sickly, he realised that it was in his travel bag. There wasn't room to carry it about his good clothes. 

Then Dorian stepped into the room. Both Gabriel and the gunman turned in their surprise to see him standing there in the doorway, a look of perfect calm upon his face. The gunman seemed oddly entranced for a moment before he swung around his gun and fired twice into Dorian's chest; he staggered back into the corridor, and fell. 

The shooting gave Gabriel the time to scramble to his feet, but that was all. The gunman turned to him, fixing him in his sights from across the room with cold grey eyes. He seemed almost soulless, almost skeletal, just a thin layer of skin stretched tight over his bones. There was no feeling in him as his finger moved on the trigger. Gabriel felt a trickle of cold sweat run down the line of his spine beneath his overly expensive shirt. He'd been such a fool to allow himself to be caught like this, and to allow Dorian to die on top of that. The loss of him seemed cruel somehow, perhaps even more so than the thought of his own death. He braced himself. 

A flash of steel was followed closely by a rush of blood that sprayed out and touched the toes of Gabriel's worn boots. The man fell, clutching at his gushing, gaping throat, thumping to the floor to lie there in a growing pool of his own blood. Dorian smiled at him, pulling a handkerchief from his pocket with which to wipe the man's blood from his blade. He then replaced it in its sheath, his cane. 

"Someone will have heard the shots," he said. "We have to leave." He turned and did just that, two bullet holes showing in the back of his coat. Quickly, Gabriel frisked the dead gunman, pulling papers from his pockets and stuffing them into his own. He picked up the gun, grabbed his bag and left the room. He followed Dorian away. 

Whatever it was that his brother was mixed up in, Gabriel suspected that the presence of this armed man did not bode well for his continued well-being. Or his own, for that matter; he was considerably more adept in dealing with the supernatural than with armed men. 

But Dorian, he thought as they ran down the little spiral staircase and out of the building, onto the city streets - Dorian, it seemed, was another matter entirely.


	7. Dorian's Gift

They checked into a small lodging house, unwilling to risk the larger hotels for the fear that they might be followed, or perhaps implicated in two recent murders. The rain had washed the blood from Gabriel's boots but the bullet holes in Dorian's clothes were hardly likely to wash away; he pulled on a heavy black cloak and held it to him tightly from the moment they stepped into the carriage to the moment they were safely ensconced in Gabriel's room. Then he cast it off over the back of an armchair and took a seat in it, fingering the holes over his chest. 

"Ruined," he muttered, plucking at a piece of loose fabric, looking more amused than bereft and certainly far from dead. "My second best shirt, ruined."

Gabriel frowned, sitting down on the edge of the bed, not taking his eyes from him for an instant. "I'd be somewhat more concerned about your chest," he said in a dark tone, narrowing his eyes just a little as he watched him carefully. 

"I don't suppose that you would believe he missed?" Dorian asked; Gabriel had seen the bullet holes in the back of the man's coat, and shook his head. "I was rather afraid that you wouldn't."

"So he hit you." Dorian nodded. "And you're not dead. You're not even wounded?"

Dorian proceeded to pull at the buttons of his jacket then his shirt as Gabriel looked on. He held the shirt open; there wasn't even a bruise on his pale skin. He wasn't injured at all. He was... flawless.

He pulled off his necktie, followed by his ruined jacket and his shirt while Gabriel frowned to himself and watched without precisely watching. Dorian opened his bag and extracted a new shirt, one minus bullet holes, and pulled it on over his perfect white shoulders, buttoning it over his slim waist. He was so vibrant even in those simple movements, especially there in that small, shabby room with its thin layers of dust and worn furniture, its threadbare rug and musty, damp odour. Dorian was indeed quite something to behold, perhaps even more so with this most recent and intriguing development. It seemed that Gabriel's gut instinct that first night had been correct; there was something of the monstrous about him. Of course, that didn’t mean he could tear his eyes from him with any more success. 

Dorian looked up and caught him watching, rewarded him with a small half-smile and a look that on any other man would have been almost sly. He smoothed one hand down over the spot on his chest where he'd been shot. Gabriel wondered idly if it hurt at all. 

"What are you?" he asked without fully meaning to, frowning anew. It annoyed him that he didn't know, hadn't known. 

The smile dropped from Dorian's face, but only for a moment. "I'm complicated," he said. 

"Invulnerable to harm?"

"It would seem so, yes."

"I've never met anyone like you."

Dorian's smile intensified for a second, with a brief flash of white teeth. "Oh no," he said. "I'm quite sure there's no one in the world quite like me."

"How did this happen?"

Dorian shrugged, standing suddenly, moving to the window in quick strides. "A very good question," he said, tucking his hands in behind his back. "I wish that I could give you a good answer." He sighed, resting his forehead against the pane of glass. "I am afraid I can't. Perhaps this is the reason, however, why I fascinate your brother so."

That he could believe. Dorian, even before he'd known of this peculiar gift, had been intriguing, almost entirely due to his exquisite good looks; now he seemed a wonder. But truthfully, when he examined the situation with a little more clarity and objectivity, this apparent invulnerability of Dorian’s was just one more reason to distrust him, much as he wanted to believe him sincere. He knew next to nothing about the man; it was simply that look of openness on his pale, striking face that so tempted him to believe he could trust him. 

Gabriel pulled off his coat and hauled himself up to sit there cross-legged on the bedspread. Then he emptied his pockets of the papers he'd collected from the dead man in Frau Kurtz's office, and began to scan through them. Dorian moved, sat completely unbidden on the end of the bed and idly picked through a few of the papers himself. Most of them it seemed were meaningless, receipts, a shopping list, Frau Kurtz's home address. But on one of them was a description, written in German, of the small black book that Gabriel had found in his brother's desk in Paris. 

"He wanted the book," he said, showing Dorian the note; Dorian just frowned briefly, the look alien to his creaseless face, apparently not too adept at reading upside-down. "It's a description."

"And that's all?"

"That's all."

"Then we've come to an impasse. We came here for nothing."

"Perhaps."

"We're no closer to finding your brother."

"Except that we now know someone has an interest in this book. It might help to find out what it says." He paused, considering whether he should continue, to tell Dorian his plan without knowing if he could trust him at all. It seemed petty then, this inclination toward distrust, considering that without the assistance of Dorian Gray he would not even have found his brother's house, and of course there was the small matter of him having saved his life back there in Maria Kurtz’s office. It was the odd feeling he gave him down in the pit of his stomach that kept him from confidence, and that feeling could be explained, he imagined, by Dorian's peculiar gift. It was ridiculous really; he was so accustomed to killing off each example of the supernatural that he ever encountered that he couldn't trust Dorian Gray because of it. And besides which, he even _looked_ trustworthy. 

"I have a friend who can help," he said, at last, almost forcing himself to speak. "I'm leaving for Rome in the morning."

Dorian nodded. "And I'm going with you," he said. Gabriel did not protest.


	8. Dracula Has Risen

The journey to Rome was long and wearing, train travel broken at intervals by stretches of journey by horse-drawn coach due to the January snow. Gabriel stared from the window in the daytime, his eyes skirting over the snow-swept countryside of Germany, the white hills and gloomy, treacherous rivers that reminded him not only a little of his time in Transylvania. Perhaps there was more to it, more than recollection that was so near in his past, but the thoughts were shadowy and deftly eluded his grasp, as ever. He leant back in his seat and let it go. 

Then, at night, he studied the book. He thought some words seemed familiar, though whether that was the result of wishful thinking or a true recollection was uncertain. He stared at it, the bold hand, the oddly sketchy, stylised drawing, as if at any moment some memory he had would be unlocked and bring it all into focus. That didn't happen. 

He slept little and infrequently, dozing off in the darkness when he hadn't the view to keep him from sleep and his ignorance of the book's contents had driven him from it, if only temporarily. And when he slept he dreamed, though when he woke he remembered nothing but a bone-deep sense of dread. Still, somehow he knew that these were not the dreams he was accustomed to, nightmares that although horrific he had grown to tolerate. These dreams were something new and jarring, not glimpses of a past that he could not have lived but set firmly in the present. He knew that, however unsure he was over how it was that he knew. 

Dorian said little from the moment they first boarded the train in Berlin. He seemed absorbed in his book, a leather-bound volume that he had produced as if from nowhere, and though curious, Gabriel refrained from asking its title. He spoke to Dorian as little as possible, again unsure as to why that was; perhaps it was that he was more accustomed to keeping his own company, perhaps the fact that his companion seemed so intent on his reading. Or perhaps it was due to those moments when Gabriel gazed from the window but saw Dorian's reflection in the glass, and saw that he was watching him. The look on his face was unsettling. 

They arrived in Rome by carriage and took rooms in a small lodging house that seemed almost the twin of the inn where they had spent the night back in Berlin, except for the owner's Italian accent. It was late and after he and Dorian had said a strained goodnight, he stripped and crawled beneath the covers of the musty-smelling bed. He fell into a fitful sleep from which he woke some hours later, feeling far from refreshed. 

He washed and dressed in the same crumpled clothes he'd been wearing for days; he took a look in the full-length mirror that was poorly attached to the back of the door and almost groaned at his appearance; he wasn't a vain man by anyone's standards, but he looked just as rough around the edges as he felt. He ran his hand over his prickly three-day beard, tapped his hat down onto his head and left the room to find Dorian. 

Conversely, Dorian looked perfect. His suit was impossibly crisp and pressed, not a hair out of place, his goatee neatly trimmed. He smiled vaguely as he answered his door and saw Gabriel, but said nothing of his appearance. Gabriel was somewhat glad of that, as had he spoken just one word about it he was not entirely convinced that he could have kept his fist from his jaw. 

They ate a brief breakfast in a small café in a wretched silence. Gabriel felt that he should have spoken but he had no words to say, though Dorian seemed perfectly at ease, watching him over the brim of his coffee cup. The placid look on his face as he did so was innocent enough, but there was something that lingered in his eyes that ruined Gabriel's appetite entirely, made him feel edgy, almost anxious. He wished that he'd left him in Berlin. He couldn't imagine having left without him. 

When he left for the Vatican, Dorian didn't go with him; he said something wholly suspect about having never been to Rome and wanting to see the sights while he had the opportunity. They made plans to meet later in the day and then he vanished into the city. Gabriel on the other hand had seen the sights already, and he headed straight for the Vatican. 

He was met there by a bishop who admonished him soundly for having left no forwarding address when he'd left London. Apparently the Church frowned upon its agents going incommunicado and turning up weeks later without showing the courtesy of even a false explanation. Gabriel suspected that they just liked to keep an eye on him, as if he were their prodigal son or some kind of strange pet. He might have been a stray they'd taken in, but he was no one's pet. 

Following his worryingly long lecture on the absolute necessity of maintaining contact with his superiors in Rome, he was shown in to Cardinal Jinette. He was sitting at a large, antique desk, surrounded by papers and books in large piles, somehow seeming serene despite it all. Perhaps his serenity had something to do with his surroundings, the vibrant frescoes that covered the walls, the finely carved furniture, the crucifixes and rosaries and articles of faith that seemed to litter every flat surface in the room. He seemed so much a part of that room also, sitting there blending in with no conscious effort, as though he were a mere extension of the décor, hard at work in its midst. Van Helsing coughed loudly, and the cardinal looked up from his papers. 

"You wanted to see me?"

Jinette removed his spectacles from the bridge of his nose and placed them on the desk as he looked Gabriel up and down, obviously just hemming in a disappointing tut. "Yes, quite, Van Helsing. I assume that Bishop Laverne has already... _spoken_ to you." Gabriel nodded, his look communicating his distaste for that particular subject. "Ah. Well, come in, sit down."

He strode across the wide room, his footfalls echoing from the high ceiling, and took a seat on the high-backed chair that sat opposite the cardinal across his desk. 

"We have a situation, Van Helsing," said Jinette, leaning forward in his seat, his hands with their steepled fingers resting on the edge of the large wooden desk. "For almost a week now we have been attempting to contact you, though we found you missing from you home in London. Of course," he waved his hand dismissively before returning it to its previous position, "Laverne has already spoken to you about _that_." He leant back and rested his hands on the arms of his chair; Gabriel watched him watching him. "We would, naturally, have sent someone in your place, but this is quite _your_ situation. It seems that..." He paused, probably for dramatic effect, which seemed perfectly in line with what Gabriel knew of the man. "I’m afraid Dracula has risen."

Gabriel stared at him for a long moment from under his eyebrows, his chin tilted down toward his chest. His fingers clamped down on the brim of his hat that he held against his lap. "I killed Dracula," he said, not quite through his gritted teeth. 

"Obviously you did not kill him quite as thoroughly as we were led to believe." The cardinal sighed and moved to rest his hands on his desk once again. "You're to leave for Transylvania with all haste," he said. "Take Carl, and whatever else you might need. And Van Helsing?" Gabriel stopped; he'd risen from his seat while the cardinal was talking and started to pull on his coat. "Kill him permanently this time."

Gabriel gave a momentary sarcastic smile then showed himself to the door. 

He knew his way easily to the laboratories of the research department and strode there down the long, draughty stone corridors with his usual purpose and pace. It was almost unbelievable to think that Dracula wasn't exactly quite as dead as he'd thought him; apparently narrowly missing becoming a werewolf on a permanent basis had been entirely in vain and seeing the count turn to ash at his bite had not been quite the sign of death that he’d imagined. Of course, he'd been dead to begin with; perhaps that was the issue. 

The Vatican was never really meant to see a winter; it was beautiful and warm during the summer months, under blue and cloudless skies, but in the winter it was gloomy, even more sombre for the grey skies and immanent rain. Wind howled in the courtyards and small, stinging raindrops spattered against the stained glass of the windows. Van Helsing turned up the collar of his woollen coat and walked a little faster. He was quite dissatisfied with the chill he felt through his uncomfortable, too-thin clothing; he vowed to change into his more familiar attire when he returned to the hotel and to hell with convention. Good tailoring would hardly help him in Transylvania, after all. 

He pushed open the heavy wooden door and stepped into the Vatican's research lab. The place was just as he remembered it, because it never changed; men bustled busily about the chamber, toying with their new devices, tinkering with old ones. He walked amongst them, completely ignored, breathing in the warm air scented with a thousand smells from every corner of the earth, some noxious and some quite as delicate as the jasmine scent of Cardinal Jinette's office. And there was Carl, in his peculiar headgear, staring at the mechanisms of his impressive automatic crossbow. 

Gabriel leaned against the long, disorganised table at which Carl was, as usual, working, and waited. Then Carl looked up, looked straight at him through his magnifying lenses, and very nearly fell right over on the floor. 

"Oh my, Van Helsing, you did give me a fright!" he said, pulling off his odd headgear and discarding it on the table as Gabriel looked on, his arms crossed over his chest and a distracted almost-smirk on his face. "You look terrible, you know. And that suit doesn't suit you at all."

"Well thanks, Carl," he said, not particularly offended since he knew it was true. "Get your things; we're leaving."

But Carl had apparently anticipated this and was already tipping silver crucifixes and bottles of holy water into a large leather bag. He looked up for a moment and handed Gabriel the crossbow. "Just like old times, eh?"

Gabriel somehow refrained from rolling his eyes. "We came back not even a month ago, both of us almost having died..." He paused and Carl looked at him, his regret at having brought up the subject almost palpably. "I'll see you outside, Carl." He walked away and didn't look back. 

Outside the building it was cold, completely chilling; Gabriel leant back against a cold stone wall and shuddered bodily, though whether from the chill wind blowing across the square or his memories, he was uncertain. He had a picture in his mind of Anna Valerious, so alive and courageous, the last of her family. Now, because of him, she was dead. 

He stared out across the square, remembering how he'd burnt what was left of her, letting her ashes scatter to the sea. He felt sure that was what she would have wanted. For that, at least, she could not reproach him. 

Carl left the building and staggered over to him under the weight of his things. Van Helsing took the bag of equipment, hefting it onto his shoulder, and Carl gave him a smile that seemed at once grateful and apologetic. They hailed a carriage and stepped up into it, directing the driver to the Piazza di Spagna.

As they pulled away, Carl chattering a mile a minute, obviously glad to be back in the field despite all that had happened, something in the square caught Gabriel's eye; she was dressed in red and her dark eyes were pleading. But before he could shout out to her, the coach had moved on. 

He looked back, but she was gone.


	9. Meeting Dorian

It was with a heavy heart that Gabriel left the carriage in the Piazza di Spagna, where he had arranged to meet Dorian. The morning had not played out as planned; the stern words he had been given by Bishop Laverne had been expected, even the audience with Cardinal Jinette, but he had assumed that would be to the tune of a wrist-slap before he slipped off to speak with Carl. Obviously he had been mistaken. The last thing he had expected - even beyond an assignment to deal with a yeti in Tibet or a minotaur in Greece - had been Dracula’s return. 

That had caught him completely off guard, to the point where he'd failed to ask Carl if he could translate the book. He might even have questioned Jinette about the alleged existence of his brother had he been entirely in his right mind, though at the time he hadn't decided if he intended to ask or not; it wasn't the case that he didn't trust the Church per se, or even Cardinal Jinette in particular, but before he knew more he did question the wisdom of mentioning Abraham’s name in the Vatican. Even Dorian had warned him against it. 

They left the carriage and stepped into the square in the grey early afternoon; Gabriel led the way to the small café in which he'd breakfasted with Dorian earlier that morning and they stepped inside. There was Dorian, looking serene as ever, sipping from a cup of coffee at his table by the window. The two of them joined him. 

"Dorian, this is Carl," Van Helsing introduced. "Carl - Dorian Gray." The two of them shook hands briefly, over the coffee pot. 

"You're a monk?" Dorian asked, raising his eyebrows inquisitively. 

"Just a friar," Carl replied. 

"Ah," Dorian said, as if that explained everything. 

The two looked at each other across the table and Gabriel watched them watch each other, how Dorian was eyeing Carl's slightly dishevelled robes and how Carl seemed to be almost staring into Dorian's face. They were so different, almost opposite ends of the scale, and from the look that the waiters were trying not to give them, Gabriel assumed that he was not alone in making that particular observation. 

"So, were you able to translate any of the book?" asked Dorian in a curiously offhand manner, before taking another sip of his coffee. 

Carl frowned and glanced at Gabriel. "Book?" he questioned. "What book, exactly?"

"I didn't have chance to ask," he explained to Dorian, who nodded placidly. Then Gabriel pulled the book from his rather large inner coat pocket and handed it over to Carl. 

He opened it carefully, flipping slowly through the pages with the fingers of one fingerless-gloved hand. "Well, I can't translate this," he said, closing the book with a flourish. 

"Why not?" Gabriel asked. 

"What exactly seems to be the problem?" asked Dorian. 

"I thought you spoke Latin, Carl."

"I do." He flipped open the book again and pointed at the bold calligraphic lettering. "But this isn't Latin. It _looks_ like Latin, like fifteenth century ecclesiastic Latin, I'd say." He narrowed his eyes and squinted oddly at the pages. "But I can assure you that _that_ is not Latin. A pseudo-Latin code, perhaps, but not actual Latin."

"Oh," said Dorian, evidently somewhat disappointed. 

"Well, this was a waste of time," said Gabriel. 

Carl, not quite registering their disappointment, was flipping through the book again, scanning the pages with that same oddly rumpled look on his face. "Fascinating, really," he said. "I might know a man in our languages branch who could help you with it. I'd be very interested to hear what it says."

"And so would I." Gabriel took off his gloves and rubbed at his eyes. "I don't want anyone else to see this. I don't want you to say a word to anyone. And besides, we have a boat to catch - you can work on it yourself."

He tugged the book from Carl's grasp and tucked it back into his pocket. Carl frowned. When he looked at Dorian, he was also frowning. 

"Boat?" he asked, with that same air of nonchalance despite his inquisitive expression. "Are we going somewhere? I thought that this was somewhat the dead end."

"It is." Gabriel shrugged and ignored Carl's questioning gaze. "There's something else I have to do. There's nothing more I can do for Abraham without more information."

It was galling even to say it, to acknowledge it out loud, but he knew that it was true; there had never been much information - just what Dorian had seen, the book that none of them understood and the address of a woman who was now dead back across borders in Berlin. The trail was cold, and it had only ever been tepid at best. Sad, but true; he'd lost his brother before he'd even found him. 

Dorian nodded. "I understand," he said with a sombre expression. "I'll return to Paris and hopefully turn up some more information there. You're leaving soon?"

"In the morning."

Dorian nodded again. It was strange; he almost felt some kind of loss just sitting there looking at him, knowing that they were about to go their separate ways, even though he couldn't even really say that he liked him. At times he did, perhaps. At others he wished he could have escaped his acquaintance entirely.

All three of them grew quiet as they all then sipped from cups of hot, strong coffee. It was not long after that they left, Carl complaining that he'd left the Vatican so soon for nothing, considering that they weren't leaving till the morning. As he stepped into the carriage behind Dorian, Gabriel told Carl to meet him at five the next day. He didn't tell him that had he actually wished it, they could have left straight away.


	10. After Dinner

Dorian Gray was an infuriating creature. 

After having sent a message on to Cardinal Jinette regarding a boat, Gabriel had accepted Dorian's invitation to dinner; they had sat there in the small yet bemusingly exclusive restaurant in absolute silence throughout the whole meal, not even a mention of Abraham or a question as to where Gabriel and Carl were going passing his infuriating lips. Apart from the odd meal he'd shared with monks, he had to say that it was the most awkward dinner he'd ever eaten. 

Dorian Gray was the _most_ infuriating creature. Following that long and silent meal and the long and silent walk back to their lodgings, he had asked Gabriel to his room for a nightcap; he'd poured two glasses of whiskey that he'd obviously purchased earlier in the day and then proceeded to take off his shoes and to sprawl barefoot and jacketless on his cheap, musty bed, his nose in a beaten-up second-hand copy of _La Divina Commedia_. After that he hadn't said a word, hadn't even looked up as Gabriel had set his glass down with a clatter and stalked from the room. 

Of course, Gabriel had said nothing either, but that was far from the point. He clenched his teeth as he stripped off his clothes and tossed them down into the bottom of the rickety wardrobe, gleeful despite his annoyance in the knowledge that he'd leave them right there in the morning and never have to wear them again. He slipped into bed and pulled up the covers, settling down for his last night in Rome. He had, much as he was loath to admit it, hoped that it might have turned out quite differently. 

He could not for the very life of him figure Dorian out, and had they had a month together, two, a year, more, he could see he'd never have understood him. They came from very different worlds or spheres at least, despite Gabriel's vast wardrobe of clothes that so resembled Dorian’s that he knew was waiting for him back in his London townhouse. Even despite Dorian's supernatural invulnerability, which he thought might have been the reasoning behind his avoidance of the Vatican... perhaps he hadn't said it, but it seemed that Dorian knew more of Gabriel's current occupation that he had let on. 

Now he was set to leave for Transylvania and Dorian for Paris. The feeling of loss was still there, as if knowing that he'd be without Dorian's luminous presence was somehow profoundly saddening. It hit him then that perhaps part of Dorian Gray's power was that beauty, seemingly impossible, unlike anything he'd ever had the fortune or indeed misfortune to see before. The unwavering innocence of his face that was so free of any trace of sin clearly led people to believe in him; at all times Gabriel was conscious of something there beneath that face that others could not see, and that made him wary. It was a lack of wrongdoing, a void where his human soul should have been, or at least a part of it. 

He had never to his knowledge known anyone so disarming or so seemingly pure. And he wanted so badly to defile him, dirty him, make him human, if he was going to put a name to the particular compulsion. He'd thought that the looks that Dorian gave him with such constancy meant that he wanted that also. Apparently though, he had read far too much into it. 

He was just drifting off, though probably into a fevered and nightmarish sleep, when there came a knock on the door. He groaned and turned over and tried hard to ignore it, but the knocking was annoyingly persistent. 

"Who is it?" he growled, half into the pillows. 

"Dorian," came the reply. 

He sighed. "What do you want?"

"Just let me in."

So he got out of bed and pulled on his trousers, buckling his belt as he walked barefoot to the door. He unlocked and opened it, rubbing his eyes. When he stepped back to let him in, Dorian kissed him. Just like that, he kissed him, softly, and then drew back and closed the door behind him. 

"What the hell was that?" Gabriel demanded, feeling substantially less furious than he knew he sounded, though Dorian seemed decidedly unperturbed by his bluster. 

"It seemed like the thing to do," he said. "Ordinarily I don't fling myself at strange men, but considering the fact that you're leaving tomorrow on some sort of gloriously secret assignment, I didn't seem to have a choice."

"So you're... flinging yourself at me?" Gabriel’s tone was only slightly incredulous, faintly amused. 

Dorian nodded. "That would seem to be accurate," he said, and laid his hand on Gabriel's bare shoulder. He flinched and stepped back, eyeing him warily. "Come, come, Gabriel - you can't say you don't want it; I've seen the way you look at me, like you'd rather enjoy eating me alive."

"You're the one who looks at _me_!" Gabriel snapped, exasperated. 

"Can you blame me?" Dorian stepped closer, and kept on advancing. 

"Well..."

"So you _do_ want it."

"This is not how I'd planned this."

"So you _planned_ this?"

"That's not what I meant."

"What _did_ you mean?"

"Look..."

"I _am_ looking, Gabriel."

"Gah!" 

And he sprang at him. His hands caught him at the shoulders and he pushed him back, hard, up against the door. It was almost like a little of the wolf was left inside him, begging to be freed just for a while, to devour Dorian Gray alive. He thought of holding back as he stood there, pinning Dorian to the door, staring into his eyes, which were as always infuriatingly calm; he wondered what it would take to force another expression to his face, to force Dorian to let go of that unsettling serenity. So he left out the wolf.

He tilted his head and dove in at Dorian's neck, fixing his hot mouth over the pulse that beat there in his jugular. His teeth grazed at Dorian's smooth skin, so much smoother than he'd imagined, and he bit down hard, tasted copper in his mouth. He looked up and Dorian smiled his vague smile; he glanced back at his throat and the wound was already healed completely. That realisation spurred him on. 

His right hand snaked up over Dorian's exposed throat, back into his long hair. He took a handful of it and yanked back his head, leaning in hard against Dorian's lithe, pliant body as he brought their mouths together. There was nothing soft about the kiss; Gabriel claimed his lips roughly, with the press of lips and teeth. Had Dorian been any other man that kiss would have been bruising; as it was he let Gabriel have free rein, licking at his lips and biting, then deepening the kiss still further, sweeping into his mouth to taste the sharp tang of whiskey that he knew was mirrored in his own. And just when Dorian began to respond, when his hand left his side and went for Gabriel's bare shoulder, he drew back, very nearly breathless. 

"Take off your tie," he said, in a voice that he barely recognised as his own it seemed so wild. Dorian met his gaze, a little colour in his cheeks now that were usually so pale. He took off his tie and threw it away onto a nearby armchair. "Now take off your shirt." So Dorian made to take off his shirt, plucking slowly - maddeningly slowly - at the buttons. Gabriel licked his teeth and stepped forward, taking Dorian by the wrists at first to stop him, then he took the two sides of the shirt in his hands and ripped it soundly apart. The noise of the ripping fabric and the click of lost buttons on the floor were like music played just for him, and Dorian seemed to be amused by it. 

He stepped back, running his appraising eyes over Dorian's bare and flawless torso, down to the dark trail of hair that led down beneath the waist of his trousers. He smiled. "Come here," he said, and Dorian did as he was bidden, stepping forward bare-chested and barefoot, his long hair brushing at his shoulders. His eyes were darker now, as Gabriel assumed were his own. He took him quickly by the shoulders, pulled him close and kissed him again. 

This time it was an altogether different experience - not in intensity on his part, but still altogether changed. His bare chest pressed to Dorian's as he pulled him in, the actions of Dorian's hands mirroring his own as he tangled them in his long hair. Their mouths joined, hard and demanding; it seemed that Dorian was intent on stealing the air from his body and his heart raced madly in response. 

This was what he'd planned. No slow seduction over dinner, no nightcap in Dorian's shabby room next door, just heat and passion and animal rutting, which the tingle and heat that pooled down low in his belly, the incipient hardness down below his belt that he felt returned in Dorian, told him would be happening soon. It had been far too long and he had such frustrations to release. He thought without really thinking that soon might not be soon enough. 

He took Dorian by the shoulders and pushed him hard, turning, so that he fell on the musty double bed with a bounce and what sounded like a stifled laugh. He looked so utterly wanton, lying there wearing only his light grey trousers that Gabriel was sure were not proper dinner etiquette, his head tossed back as he propped himself up on his forearms. Gabriel stalked forward, watching as Dorian moved to fluidly back, up toward the headboard; he knelt on the edge of the bed, feeling it dip down with his weight, and crawled up slowly over Dorian's supine form. 

"You want me to take you," he said lowly, the words definitely far from a question. His head was dipped down, tilted to his lips were right by Dorian's ear, as he knelt there leaning down between Dorian's spread thighs. 

"Of course," came the hoarse, unnecessary but gratifying response. Gabriel smiled, the look probably almost feral, and then brought up one hand; he watched with silent glee as Dorian's eyes widened as he stroked at the prominent bulge in his trousers. So that was the way to change his expression. He had a feeling that he could do even more in that particular vein. 

He leant back on his calves and made light work of the fastenings of Dorian's trousers - he pulled open the flaps and pushed in his hand, his long, callused fingers curling around the base of his hard cock. It seemed to him that Dorian was trying very hard not to cry out, so he squeezed a little, just hard enough to be a little painful right alongside the pleasure. Dorian moaned beneath him and Gabriel smiled. That was amusing, feeling Dorian's extremity pulsing heavy in his hand, but there was more; he wanted to make him lose his perfect control, to rob him of it in its entirety and not just in these separate small parts. 

He pulled at the waist of Dorian's trousers, tugged and moved, contorting around him until the clothing lay on the chair across the room where he'd tossed it and Dorian himself lay there beneath him, gloriously naked. Gabriel looked over him, his sharp white teeth showing as he grinned. He ran his hands over Dorian's thighs, over his chest, plucking at his nipples as he watched his fingers curling into the sheets. Then he fumbled quickly at his belt and soon his trousers hung upon, pushed down on his hips just far enough to pull out his harness. 

Dorian spread his legs wider in the anticipation of what was to come; Gabriel leant down and pulled his bag from just under the side of the bed, producing a small bottle of something clear and viscous, the primary purpose of which was, bizarrely, oiling his hat. Dorian pulled up his knees as Gabriel pulled at the stopper; in one short moment he'd spread a generous amount over his pulsing cock and discarded it to the bedside cabinet. Then he leant down, close enough that their foreheads rested together for a second. 

He kissed him quickly as he pushed inside, eliciting a moan that he swallowed with great satisfaction. They'd both wanted it rough so he hadn't prepared him, and he was glad to feel the tightness, the searing heat. He let his head and his hair hang forward as he rocked, slowly, just a minute amount, until he had the control to continue. Dorian's white hands clutched almost desperately at his forearms, digging down to the point of pain as he pulled out with agonising precision, and then thrust back in with bone-jarring force. 

Dorian cried out loud and he knew he'd found the angle. He drew out and thrust again and again, Dorian almost incoherent beneath him. He felt flushed, elated, spiralling higher and out of control; Dorian bucked against him, one hand straying down to his own cock that was almost trapped between them. He jerked wildly, the light from the lamps playing on his blushing skin as he glowed there, divine. When he came, in long sticky bursts that fell between them, Gabriel knew that his own release would not be long after. 

He came buried inside him up to the hilt, moaning aloud and pressing down hard against Dorian's heated body. It was heaven in that moment, inside him, his breath coming in those short, sharp gasps. He tingled. When Dorian's hand touched his face he opened his eyes, unsure when he'd closed them. 

He slipped from his body and lay down beside him, regaining his breath. Dorian wiped them both off with a piece of his ruined shirt, then he put out the lamp. 

Gabriel was too tired to protest. He fell asleep then, still partially dressed, in that bed beside Dorian Gray.


	11. The Stake in the Wood

He knew that he was dreaming. He knew because he'd gone to sleep in that cheap, musty bed in Rome and now that he had ostensibly woken, he was lying fully dressed on the floor of the thick, dark wood. The only issue was the fact that it felt so very real; he could feel the contours of the ground beneath him, he could smell the earth and the fresh scent of the pine trees. And it was so cold, chilling him right through in spite of his thick black clothing and the fact that there seemed to be absolutely no wind in the air. 

Slowly, he rose to his feet, using the tree to his side for support. The bark felt rough against his palms, grating at his skin, so he pulled his thick leather gloves from his pockets and tugged them on tight. Then he felt for his guns, his blades, and found they were missing. He scanned the ground, illuminated with almost perfect clarity by the huge full moon that hung overhead, for his crossbow; he didn't find it. Just because this was a dream that didn't mean to say that he wouldn't wish to defend himself were he attacked, and he had no weapons. Even for a dream, that was not a particularly good sign. 

He began to walk. Perhaps he should have stayed where he had woken and let the dream come there to him, but his limbs felt curiously stiff as if he had been lying there for hours, completely unmoving, and he thought that walking might just help. He walked briskly, leaves rustling and twigs cracking beneath his feet, but he had decided that since this was a dream, stealth was of a rather low priority. He had a feeling that in dreams there was little you could do to change their course, no matter the relative wisdom or folly of the actions taken. So he walked briskly, the branches catching at his shoulders and the hand before his face, almost sweeping the hat from his head. 

Soon, he came to a clearing. At least he assumed that it was soon, but when he though back over his steps since waking at the foot of that great pine tree, there seemed to be more in his memory than 'soon' would actually warrant. His head started to throb and he decided that such questions as the warping of time while unconscious were best left to the philosophers of the world. More particularly ones who weren't sleeping, or standing in a small clearing in a wood that existed solely in their mind. 

The moonlight was so bright now that there were no tall trees to shade him from it that it took a moment for his eyes to adjust. He peered about, tilting back his hat for a better view, and as his vision cleared the dark, looming shape there in the very centre of the clearing came into sharp focus. It was a stake perhaps twice the height of an average man, driven down deep into the ground, and from what he could see there was someone tied to it, around at the opposite side. That sense of dread with which he had woken so frequently of late welled up inside him like some dreadful, intimate acquaintance. He knew there was some part of him that knew already what he was about to find. He stepped closer. He rounded the stake, and looked. 

She was wearing a red dress, a vivid, horrific blood red against her pale skin under the bright white light of the moon. She had on white satin gloves that reached up to her elbows, her wrists tied together with thick rope above her head. She was wearing a mask, metallic, shining almost blindingly and obscuring half of her pale face; still he knew it was her. 

"Anna," he said. 

Her lips parted as if she was about to speak, but all that he heard was a sigh. Then she looked at him, the mask unable to hide her eyes. She didn't need to say a word; he knew that she was pleading. 

He stepped forward quickly and tugged at the ropes, but the knots held fast. He was standing so close to her that they were almost touching and he could feel her breath against his throat. It was cold, like a breath of winter wind, and made him shudder at the faintest touch of it against his skin. It was wrong; her breath should have been warm, like mist in the freezing air, but he had no time to dwell on the reason for it. The calm night was split by a shriek, and a batting of huge wings, and he knew that the vampires were coming. 

There was nothing he could do. The knots in the rope that held Anna there would not yield to him, and he could not leave her. The shrieking was horrible, ringing in his ears, and grew closer. And then there they were, Dracula's three monstrous brides, who pushed him away and clawed at Anna's too-pale flesh. She didn't scream. She didn't make a sound. And he could not move. 

He was being held, his shoulder clasped in a vice-like grip as he stood there and watched as the brides he knew were dead devoured the woman whose body he'd burnt himself. Their mouths were stained with blood - her blood. Somehow he knew that his would never touch their lips; he was held there then by Dracula, he knew it, _felt_ it, and Dracula would not let the women have him. 

Anna hung dead at the stake; Dracula's three brides were women again and not those creatures, at least in form, and they lapped at the wounds they had torn in her arms, in her throat. Their eyes, though, were on him. They were watching. 

Dracula pulled off Gabriel’s hat and tossed it to the ground. The wind was rising rapidly around them, whirling through the trees, and it caught at Gabriel's hair, whipping it about his face. A fork of lightning split the sky and as the thunder cracked, the heavens spilt forth a gush of icy rain as though wounded. In mere seconds he was soaked and shivering, his sodden hair thrashing at his face as Dracula's hands kept him there, unmoving. The moon seemed dark. Through the shuddering hiss of the rain he heard the brides' laughter, and then they were gone. 

He felt himself turning, as though the world had spun sickly on its axis beneath him, and in the moment of a lightning flash he struck out for Dracula's face. He felt his wrist caught, the bones grinding together in the pressure of Dracula's grasp. He looked up, bringing his gaze up from the ground into Dracula's dark, shining eyes. For a second or longer they seemed devoid of white, of iris even, just a mass of deep, soulless black. And then Dracula moved in closer. 

He struggled against him, but only at first. Soon he felt too weak, feeling every second, every drop of his life spilling steadily from him with each beat of his heart. He had imagined it would be some kind of frenzy, with a beating of his heart that he would hear in his ears as he felt it in his veins, but that was not the case at all; in the midst of the biting rain and the swirl or wind, he felt he was the calm eye of the storm. As Dracula held him, his hands in his hair and his mouth at his throat, all he felt was warmth despite the bitter cold. It was a perfect, windswept moment. 

And as he died, he woke.


	12. To Varna

The morning came, thick and black and filled with a dread he felt was almost tangible. He was awake, as he had planned, at shortly after half past four, and all he remembered as he dragged himself up to full consciousness was that he had dreamt. The dream itself was gone. As was Dorian. 

He stretched out his arm and the opposite side of the bed was empty, cold. He understood then that something was wrong but kept himself from guessing what exactly that was. Then he fumbled with the matches from the bedside cabinet until one of the lamps was lit, as his eyes adjusted to the dim glare of light, he saw that Dorian was gone though that vacant pillow still retained the scent of his hair. Then he looked around, peered down over the side of the bed and saw the contents of his bag tipped out onto the floor. The realisation dawned on him as he left the bed and sorted through what remained; the bastard had stolen the book. 

He pulled on his trousers, left the room and hammered briefly on Dorian's door although already convinced he wouldn't find him there. There was no answer and when he forced the door he found no single trace of him. Apart from the ache in his muscles that went down to the bone and an acute sense of hot betrayal, there was nothing at all to suggest that Dorian Gray had even existed. He sighed deeply, cursed himself, and returned to his room. He should have trusted his instincts. 

His bag took just over two minutes to repack; he washed quickly, dressed and left the place, dropping the key to the room that he'd abandoned, along with the money he owed for it, on the desk before leaving. He stepped out into the cold early morning air, the buckles of his leather coat jangling. He didn't feel the cold as he stepped up into the carriage sent there by the Vatican and nodded to Carl. As they pulled away, he made a mental note: as soon as he returned from Transylvania - assuming he did, which was a chilling thought - he would find Dorian Gray. He could think of several ways to make him pay. 

They left from the port outside of Rome two hours later, on a boat called the Valparaiso. It was small, with a crew that looked at Carl with a kind of wonder that Gabriel could not quite find amusing. He had a feeling that their passage to Varna would be very long indeed. 

He settled down in his bunk and slept, fully clothed. When he woke with a crick in his neck to the sound of Carl tinkering with his crossbow at the table, he felt ill. He'd never liked to be at sea, especially with a hyperactive friar. He couldn't eat; Carl and the men offered him food close to constantly but more often than not he refused. Sleeping left him unrefreshed. All that left for him was conversation. 

Carl was interesting company to say the least, with inexhaustible tales of life in the Vatican, maintenance tips for Gabriel's various weapons and excruciating jokes that rather required the listener to have at least a passing knowledge of the Latin language. At least, however, he'd managed to steer him away that first day from the topic of the mysterious book that had apparently intrigued him, and Dorian Gray. After that it was plain sailing, so to speak. 

For part of each day Carl spoke with the ship's crew; apparently they were quite devout Spanish Catholics for the most part, and though ancient maritime tradition wasn't exactly resoundingly in favour of having men of the cloth on board, the sailors were positively ecstatic at his presence. That meant that for at least two hours a day while Carl pottered around with a Latin Vulgate and half the crew, Gabriel was left alone, feeling green and perpetually unsteady on his rather feeble sea legs. He preferred travel overland. And when Carl left the room, that gave him too much time to think. 

He'd been duped. By a pretty face and flattering interest, though he'd been more driven to the act by annoyance than seduction. All that time... three countries and more than a week playing a part every single minute. He was starting to wonder if anything that Dorian said had been true; if that was even his name, if Abraham Van Helsing even existed or if it had all been one large and curious trick from the start. Had Dorian helped to kidnap his brother? Did he actually _have_ a brother? What on earth was so important in that book, and why had Maria Kurtz had to die? He had a feeling he would never know, now that Dorian was gone. 

And then, of course, there was the small matter of Dracula. Gabriel had killed him, seen him die, and yet apparently he had returned. For a moment he wondered if there hadn't been some mistake, that none of it was true, that Dracula was just as dead as he'd left him and Cardinal Jinette was wrong. He even wondered if it could be a trick, as Dorian's very presence had been, and perhaps the cardinal was in on it. But that was just his latent paranoia talking, spurred on by the endless rolling of the sea. 

He stayed in his bunk below deck, not even setting foot out there in the ten days they spent at sea. The only time he went above was when they came at last, following what had seemed to him an eternity of the worst seasickness of his life, to the Black Sea port of Varna, on the coast of Bulgaria. It was dark when they docked, the sky a fathomless black in which he could see no stars; he'd hoped that they would land with daylight to welcome them but he was pleased despite the dark as they'd made good time. Perhaps in fair weather they would have landed sooner, but in the winter months and crossing mountains they could have been held up for weeks coming by land. 

With Carl lagging behind he went ashore, hefting his bags. The town was quiet as they left the ship and its crew behind with a brief goodbye and headed for the boarding house by the seafront where they'd both stayed before. He knocked, loudly, and as he waited for the owner - who was probably rising from bed - he tried not to look out to sea. The calm black waters chilled him more efficiently than the frigid air, their ominous depths evoking in him a distinct feeling of unease and perhaps a little dread. It was as if he saw his own fate in the blackness.

Then, with a clatter of locks, the door of the boarding house opened. The frustrated look on the owner's face was somewhat abated when Van Helsing thrust a generous sum of money into his hand and he allowed them inside. With a satisfied grin he called for his wife and while they ate from bowls of reheated stew - the most that Gabriel had eaten in over a week - their rooms were prepared. It made a change to be settling down to bed on a full stomach, in a room whose floor didn't tip and tilt sickly with the rolling of the waves. 

As he slept he dreamed, though as he woke he had no time to remember. It was five o'clock by local time and the sky outside was still pitch black; he hadn't woken of his own accord but rather some noise or other, some disturbance had stirred him. He pulled the pistol from under his pillow, slowly, gazing around in the blackness, seeing nothing. 

He slipped from the bed, almost silently, and felt his way to the door. There was a click down the corridor outside that he heard with his ear pressed to the door, like a lock; he inched open the door and stepped outside, his bare feet making no noise against the rugs that lined the corridor. There was slightly more light there, from the moon that shone outside the small, high window at the end of the hall, and by it he could have _sworn_ that he saw the edge of the door to Carl's room clicking shut. He didn't take that as a good sign. He inched closer, and when he listened at the door there was a faint muffled sound came from inside. That was not a good sign at all. 

As he cocked his gun he felt for the handle, then slipped open the door. For some reason he could not divine he thought of that man back there across Europe, the skeletal man that had died in the office of Maria Kurtz. He remembered the sunken hollows of his eyes as he'd shot the woman, remembered the expensive suit laid over stretched, thin skin. He'd seemed barely alive even before Dorian had slashed his throat. Dorian, who'd killed that man for no better reason that Gabriel could discern than to gain his trust. He'd been after the book all along; to Gabriel's shame, now he had it. Not that either of them knew what it contained - he felt sure of that, remembering how enthusiastic Dorian had been in his own way to have Carl translate it. And if he had, he would probably be lying dead in some dank Roman alley, dead as the man in Maria Kurtz's office. 

His mind was stuck on that man as he stepped into Carl's room, on the sickening fact that he'd seemed most alive whilst he died. For a second he glanced at his boots to make sure that the blood was gone, then realised with a flash of self-mockery that he was barefoot and the blood had washed away in the rain that day just moment after it had touched. And that he should have been paying attention to the situation at hand. And that Carl was not alone in the bed. 

"Carl!" he exclaimed, a little more loudly that he would have liked, if indeed he'd meant to speak at all. Carl and the girl sprang apart, and suddenly Gabriel understood the muffled sounds. "Carl... is that Elena?" The girl blushed and pulled up the sheets as Gabriel lowered the gun. 

"Well... yes, as a matter of fact," said Carl with a ridiculous look of bewilderment on his face, blushing rather, his hair even more tousled than usual. 

"Somehow I don't think our host would be impressed that you're bedding his youngest daughter." Carl blushed even more brightly and Elena scampered from the room, taking a sheet and her discarded clothing with her. 

"Surely you didn't sneak into my room just to catch me with the serving girl, Van Helsing?" Carl asked, pulling his remaining sheet up just a little higher. 

Gabriel coughed and rubbed at his eyebrows. Just when he'd thought he'd got away with it, interrupting, Carl had had to ask. Of course. "Well, I thought I heard... but it was..." He coughed again and backed toward the door.

"Ah, I see," Carl said. "Well, I'm glad you're on your guard." Carl frowned but almost smiled. "In fact, I rather..."

He didn't get to finish that thought. Gabriel was seized from behind and Carl's words died in his throat. The grip was maddening, a bony forearm barred across his throat, and in the second as he'd been yanked suddenly backward into that grip he'd dropped his pistol with a dull metallic thud. He couldn't catch his breath; he clawed at the arm but couldn't take hold of it, gasped dryly as he gaped at Carl, and felt his vision swim. 

For a moment he believed he would die, honest to God, and have failed in his assignment, Dracula still roaming the earth. But then in one last, desperate attempt he lunged forward, dipping his shoulder and tossing his attacker in across the floorboards. He grabbed his gun from the floor, aimed, and fired.

As the shot rang out and he looked down at the man that he'd killed, he frowned. He could see his face clearly in the moonlight from the window, and what he saw unsettled him; he was almost sure then that it was the same man, the man from Berlin. 

"You killed him!" Carl exclaimed from the bed, pointing. 

Gabriel turned from the familiar corpse and cast Carl a sardonic look. "It might have escaped your notice but I was being attacked," he said. "I could have used a little help."

"Well, I'm naked", Carl said, as if that explained everything. "And you seemed to be doing so well..."

"The man was _strangling_ me, Carl!" Gabriel sighed and rubbed at his throat. "You'd better take my room tonight. I'll take care of this."

"But..."

"Go." So Carl left the bed, grabbed his clothes and headed to the door. "And leave the sheet." It hit the floor and Carl scampered away, closing the door behind him. 

When the owner came to the room, Gabriel assured him that all was well, that he'd dropped his gun and it had fired by mistake. And when the owner was gone, he stood over the body lying there on the bedroom floor. He looked closer and he saw it wasn't the same man at all, though the gaunt angles of his face had a terribly familiar look. His sallow skin was stretched out tight over his bones, his eyes sunken, his body thin as a man starved to the point of death. They seemed so similar... and he had to dispose of him. 

He sighed, coming to his knees and reaching for a blade. It would be a long, long night.


	13. Transylvania

The morning was overcast, the sky at Varna grey and oppressive with rain clouds that mirrored in their threat of rain that sense of the impending that Gabriel felt in his dreams. When they left in their hired carriage, Carl fixing the girl Elena with one last longing gaze, there was talk in the town of a drowning - a man had been seen in the harbour, before he'd been pulled down by the currents into the gloomy depths. Word was that they would never know the truth. 

It began to rain as they left Varna and didn't cease all that day or the next. Elena had seen to it that they had food to last them till they reached their destination and they ate in the coach while they changed horses, while Gabriel told Carl a little of the story of Maria Kurtz's death and the apparent existence of another Van Helsing; Carl seemed enthused by this, that there could be someone in the world who could expound on Gabriel's strangely tenuous past and, if Gabriel himself were the standard to judge by, aid somewhat in the Church's perpetual struggle against all that was evil. Obviously Carl, in his zeal, had trouble grasping the meaning of 'but he was kidnapped and is probably dead.'

They drove on. The roads were all mud from the rain and the horses soon tired from it but they kept on. It rained harder, and darkened; the driver insisted that they stop, only deterred from it the first three times by the offer of money before the rain grew so bitter and torrential that no sum, no matter how generous, could induce him to continue. They stopped that night in a small inn in a small village where the people spoke a language that Gabriel didn't understand. 

It was a place by the Bulgarian border with Romania, the bad weather having slowed them so greatly that they had not yet passed out of the country in which they had landed. Still, with the ache in him from a day's travel by coach, and from the previous night's exertions, he was glad of the soft bed and the warm room, the hot meal and the wine. He almost felt it steeled him for what was to come. 

His sleep was deep though plagued with dreams, thick and cold as the seas at Varna and just as tumultuous. When he woke, though, he remembered a new warmth; the idea of it both sickened and compelled him, and he did not dwell on it. A long day still lay ahead. 

He found, however, not long after his light breakfast in the tavern below his room, that the coachman was still reluctant to continue. The rain had ceased though the day was again overcast, and the roads had frozen; Gabriel was unsure what it was over the border that he dreaded so, but apparently the promise of cold, hard currency helped to alleviate his fears. Within half an hour, spent hunting down Carl who had apparently gone in search of provisions, they were back underway. 

They drove hard, growing silent as they passed over the border into Romania and the region of Wallachia. They changed their horses at Bucharest and moved on, down paths white with a thin, hard snow that crunched under the horses' hooves and the wheels of the coach. Great wooded hills grew up around them, snow-covered, windswept, and Gabriel could tell even without the view from the window that they were drawing close. It was a clear feeling in him, some strange but definite knowledge that soon they would have returned there, to that place, and the struggle would recommence. He realised as if for the first time that he had absolutely no idea, short of voluntary lycanthropy, of how he was to kill Dracula, and then even less of how to _keep_ him dead. That simple realisation was chilling. But before he could break the icy silence to ask Carl his opinion, the coach had stopped. Frowning, he stepped from it, and the driver came down. 

He explained with a strange look on his face, conflicted when Gabriel offered him money, that he would go absolutely no further. The tales he'd heard of the terrors that lay in Transylvania were so real to him that he whole pouch of coins that Gabriel offered would not in any way sway him; he took what he was owed and turned back immediately, leaving them there on the edge of a tiny village on Wallachia's border. It wasn't surprising; the same had happened to them before. 

It was early afternoon as they entered the village, their bags shared between them, the mud clinging to the hems of Gabriel's long coat and Carl's robes. The villagers looked at them strangely but that too was unsurprising, considering local costume and the large metal crossbow that Gabriel carried slung over one shoulder. But fortunately the two of them were little more than a curiosity there and not seen as a threat; Gabriel had found more than one village out of which he'd had to fight his way following a coachman's untimely withdrawal. 

They found a small inn where he left Carl to eat and went in search of a stable. Fortunately the language that the tall, gruff blacksmith who owned the horses spoke was one that he knew, and though he found that there was no coach that he could either hire or buy outright, there were horses with which the blacksmith was willing to part. He bought two - a large black stallion for which the blacksmith made him pay dearly, and a chestnut mare - and they left, quickly. It was four o'clock in the afternoon and already the sky was darkening. 

There were wolves in the woods. They could hear them as they rode, the howling back behind the tree line spooking the horses and not exactly effective in spurring on either of the riders, either. The only heartening thought was that it was the night of a new moon and not the full, though wolves of any form weren't a particularly cheerful night-time companion. They were glad when, just after sunset when there was still a little light in the sky by which to see their way, they saw the lights of a village on the horizon. Perhaps they wouldn't be fodder for the wolves after all. 

It was only as they reached the place, a little way from the edge of the forest and over the river, under the stars and the moon that lit their way, that Gabriel realised where it was they had come to. Not Anna's village but one nearby, over the river and down the bank a way. If it had been light he was almost sure that Castle Frankenstein, or at least its tall turrets, would have been visible by the line of the mountains. His heart leapt in his chest, and he was uncertain if he felt glad or something else entirely. In any case, he felt as though some great thing were imminent, for good or ill. 

They dismounted, tied off their horses to a post in the square and scanned the place for an inn. It was difficult in the dim light cast from the windows of the houses set about the square but they found one and, shouldering their rather heavy bags laden with Carl's apparently 'essential' equipment, they went for the door. Which was, he found, locked, so he set about knocking. It wasn't long before a small and rather haggard-looking woman came to answer the door. 

"What's your business here?" she asked, her accent clear enough for Gabriel to understand her, as she cast her suspicious gaze over the two of them. 

"Well, we'd rather like to let a couple of rooms from you," said Carl, who apparently understood her also and was feeling particularly courageous. 

"And what's your names?" she asked, now frowning suspiciously, as if asking for a room at her inn wasn't exactly common practice. Perhaps it wasn't. 

"I'm Carl," said Carl, "and this--"

"You a monk?"

He smiled slightly, as though pleasantly surprised. "No, just a friar."

"Ah." Her gaze shifted to Gabriel. "And you?"

He looked her over quickly; she was short and stout with greying hair brought back from her face quite severely; he guessed that in her younger days she'd been quite a beauty but there was little sign of it in her now - it had most likely been driven out of her by her long hard life in that hard land, never far from that village. "Van Helsing," he said. 

She frowned. "Van Helsing?"

He nodded slowly, tipping back his hat so that the light from within shone on his face, so he could look her in the eye. "Yes."

"We already have a man here by that name," she said. 

Carl looked at him - he could see him from the corner of his eyes. He glanced at him and then back at the innkeeper, a frown on his brow. Another Van Helsing? But... no. "You're mistaken."

"No," she said, with a look of insistence. "I'm not."

"But..."

"There is already a man here called Van Helsing, I tell you." She was close to rolling her eyes and throwing the two of them out, he could tell. "He's been here a week or more. Foreign gentleman, grey hair, ever so polite most times, unlike some. Don’t look like _you_ at all." She frowned at him and his dress disapprovingly.

Carl tugged at his shoulder. "You don't suppose...?"

" _Abraham_ Van Helsing?"

"That's the gentleman."

Gabriel felt cold, tight at the back of his neck. "Could I speak with him?" he asked. 

"I'll ask, but I'm promising nothing." She slammed the door and scurried away. Gabriel supposed that the look on his face then wasn't all too pleasant, judging from the way Carl opened his mouth to speak and then apparently thought better of it. And then the woman reappeared. "Well, you'd better come in, I suppose," she said, grudgingly. "He says that he'll see you." And she let them inside. 

The room had a low beamed ceiling and a few old tables scattered over the worn tiled floor. There were mugs on the bar, a few plates of leftover food and lamps in the corners hanging from nails or set up in niches in the walls. And there was a man in a high-backed chair by the open fire, visible only from his arm and a shining silver ring on the arm of the chair. The scene reminded him oddly of Van... Van... that forgettable man back in London, what seemed an age ago. He had a feeling, however, that he might remember this meeting just a little longer. 

"Abraham Van Helsing?" he asked, in a tone much steadier than he currently felt. 

The man moved and stood and Gabriel saw him for the first time there, in front of the fire; he was perhaps his own height with grey hair that fell to his shoulders, dressed in a worn suit and wearing a devilish smile. There was a glint in his sharp blue eyes not entirely due to the lamplight and for a moment Gabriel almost thought that he knew him, knew that glint more than anything, but then that moment was gone. He found he wished it hadn't passed. 

"That’s me," said the man in an accent perhaps Dutch or German, stepping forward, and he clapped him about the shoulders with a shocking force. "It is good to see you, Gabriel. I had almost given up the hope that you would come. Come, sit." He gestured to the seats by the fire but Gabriel didn't move an inch. 

“You know me?" he asked instead. 

The man nodded slowly, a small wry smile spreading on his wrinkled yet surprisingly youthful face. "Ah, I see that the reports of your memory loss were unfortunately accurate," he said. "I had hoped that my sources would prove to be mistaken. But at the very least you’re here, and that I take as a good omen. Indeed, very good." He rubbed at his untidy grey stubble with one rather tanned, ink-stained hand. "You _are_ late, however."

"I came as fast as I could."

"As fast as you could after the Vatican sent you, no doubt," said the man with a wag of his finger. "I would have had you here faster."

"If you hadn't been kidnapped, I suppose."

"Kidnapped?"

"I was told you were kidnapped."

"I was nothing of the sort."

Gabriel sighed loudly and dropped his bags and his bow to the ground with a loud clatter and a stifled protest from Carl. "I should have known," he said, stepped forward and dropping down into a chair by the fire; Abraham did the same, and Carl went to see if he couldn't find some wine and soup. "Dorian lied about that, too."

Abraham frowned and crossed his legs at the knee, steepling his fingers. "Dorian Gray?" he inquired. Gabriel nodded. "I had questioned his loyalty, I admit, but found that I had no choice but to trust him once I was called away. So he met you at the ball, as I asked him?"

"He did." Gabriel was confused, and he sighed. "I'm confused; you asked him to meet me, but then he told me you'd been captured. Why?"

Abraham shrugged. "I don't know," he said frankly.

"Did he know you didn't have the book?"

"He knew where I was going. What book?"

"The black book. The one that everyone seems to be intent on finding, that Maria Kurtz died for and that Dorian Gray stole from me."

Then Abraham started to chuckle. It was odd, a dry sort of muted laugh down deep in his throat that sounded like a kind of bastardised coughing. It was surprising, disturbing, and more than a little annoying, but Abraham didn't seem to notice Gabriel's consternation; he just chuckled. 

"I don't see what's amusing," Gabriel said, cutting in on it. 

"Oh, my apologies," said Abraham, still smiling and an inch from laughter. "I don't mean to suggest that the death of Maria Kurtz is anything less than tragic, but so much effort expended over such a thing as that book is to me quite hysterical."

"Would you care to explain _why_?"

Abraham nodded slowly and attempted to collect himself. "It's a diary," he said. 

"And?"

"No, you don't see. It's _my_ diary."

Gabriel rubbed his eyes tiredly and tossed his hat onto a table, raking his fingers through his hair. "Well, I _still_ don't see."

Abraham sighed. "I wrote that diary. There has a been a circulating rumour for some time now that it does contain some secret method by which the immortal Count Dracula may be banished from the earth, but... I’m afraid it does nothing of the sort. The most interesting page, I’m most sad to say, is a particularly good recipe for goulash."

"But... a _diary_?" Abraham nodded. "The one in the drawer with..." He fumbled in his waistcoat pocket and pulled out the silver watch; Abraham took it. "...this?"

"Ah, I see you found my pocket watch. I had to leave without it." He played with it, fixed it to his own worn waistcoat and then wound it, correcting the time. "Yes, the diary that was with my watch."

"But then why was it in Latin?"

"A Latinate code," Abraham corrected. 

Gabriel bit his tongue. "So, why was it in a _Latinate code_?"

Abraham shrugged. "Would you want anyone reading _your_ diary?"

Gabriel stared at him for a moment in total disbelief, and then he laughed a little wryly as the truth sank in. "Then all this... it's been a waste of my time."

"Not entirely." He looked up; there was a glint back in Abraham's eye that somehow he knew meant a plan was forming, or coming together. "You are here, after all. And Dracula has risen from the grave. Perhaps this time, now that there are two of us - the Van Helsings together, who would have believed it after all this time! - we shall defeat him. And then, perhaps, we shall rest."

Gabriel shifted in his seat. He could hear Carl by the bar talking with the lady innkeeper who seemed far more genial now than when they'd met her at the door. Perhaps nothing that had happened since his arrival in London now mattered, since in the end he was there, and Dracula had risen. Perhaps nothing mattered but Dracula's death. Perhaps. 

"Are you my brother?" he asked, though it wasn't what he'd meant to say at all. 

Abraham nodded solemnly. "I am."

"Then you can tell me my past."

"Perhaps I can."

"And will you?"

He smiled, seeming suddenly ten years older, wiser, and he nodded again. "I will, if that is truly what you want," he said. "But in the morning. You and your friend both need your rest; so sleep, and tomorrow, I will try my best to explain."

Gabriel wanted to protest, to make him say what it was that he had to say _right then_. But he was tired, weary, and at the thought of a bed after his hard ride he weakened. Tomorrow would be soon enough - what was one more night's wait after all that time? 

There was a room prepared; he locked the door and pulled off his clothes before crawling naked into the warm bed by an open fire. It was not long before his eyes closed, and sleep took him.


	14. The Prayer

His dreams were getting darker. 

This time he remembered a vast black wood, full of long branches that clawed at him, snagging in his hair and scoring lines into the leather of his coat. He bled from a scratch above his eyes that made his vision swim in sickly red. And there was something, _something_ there... he could feel it even if he couldn't see it. When he woke that was what he remembered, that something unseen, and nothing more. 

There was bright sunlight streaming in through the unshaded window and he was warmed by it into waking. He couldn't remember the last time he'd felt that, or even seen the sunlight; the days since he'd arrived in London had been so very dark. He lay there, smiling softly to himself as he revelled in it, until at last he jerked awake; his mind had wandered and he'd wondered about the time. He pulled his pocket watch from the top of the cabinet beside the bed and, after rubbing briefly at his eyes, found that it was very close to eleven o'clock. 

He scrambled from the bed and dressed quickly, reattaching his watch to his waistcoat and holstering his pistol. Pulling on his coat he left the room and startled the surly lady innkeeper on the stairs, demanding to know where his brother was. At first she suggested that he calm down and take some breakfast, but she was soon persuaded to tell him what she knew and he headed off out of the inn, stalking off toward the forest. He didn't get far from the village before he found Abraham walking back in the opposite direction, Carl at his side. 

"Ah, Gabriel, it would seem that you have risen at last," said Abraham, smiling brightly and quite obviously ignoring Gabriel's rather murderous look. Carl didn't, however; he was standing by the elder Van Helsing and looking rather small, avoiding his eyes. 

"Why did you let me sleep so late?" he demanded, his tone sounding a little ridiculous even to himself, considering he was so terribly upset over a few extra hours of sleep, but he stubbornly did not cease to glare. 

"It seemed that you could use the rest," Abraham said with a shrug. "We decided to let you sleep, and if you were not awake by the time that we returned, we would have woken you then."

The answer should have appeased him; it rather did, in point of fact, but the glare abated only a little as he turned to walk with them back to the village. Carl and Abraham continued to converse without him in a language that he didn't speak but knew was Latin, right up until they reached the door of the inn. Then Carl excused himself and slipped off to his room with a book that Abraham gave to him, produced from the inside pocket of his large dark overcoat. 

"What did you give him?" Gabriel asked as soon as Carl was gone, leaning back against the wooden panelling of the bar while Abraham helped himself to two large mugs of ale over the top of it. 

"A book," he replied, passing him a mug then sipping from his own, looking at him from over the brim. "One of my diaries if you really do want to know, as your friar friend seems to be intrigued by my code and has a strange desire to crack it. But I suspect this is not the question that you want to ask."

Gabriel shook his head slowly. "I want you to tell me about my past," he said. 

"Then come and sit down with me."

They walked across the room, hanging up their coats and hats and settling down in the worn, high-backed chairs by the fire. Abraham took another sip from his mug and then rested it against his knee; Gabriel did the same but didn't really taste it. 

"I remember a time when we were living in France," Abraham said slowly, leaning back into his chair. "It was a small village and I cannot now recall the name of it, but there we lived for a long time, and I think we were quite happy. We had land which we worked and from which we lived, and I had my books. We kept the villagers safe from that which would have harmed them. I do not think that our life there could have lasted, but we were never to test its longevity as the Church called on us, as they always have. 

"I had been expecting the call for some time, and was almost relieved to receive it, as were you, despite our happy lives there. They had promised that they would call just one last time and then we would be free of it. So we left our village and our home and went into the east, to do this one last thing in the name of God and His Church. 

"We were away in that land for years, defending it from an enemy of another faith who we were told would have taken the country from the Church. We fought in many battles, you and I, though in time we grew apart. You were always the man of action of we two brothers, and I the scholar; I did fight, of course, but I hung back, I watched you and I chronicled your achievements in my diaries. Your achievements, and your great friendship with the man who led a portion of that country's army. He was a prince and a very great man then, who served God without question. You two were never to be seen one without the other, even upon the battlefield. Until that final day. 

"He renounced God, though I never knew why and I'm not sure that you did, either. After the greatest, the bloodiest and longest lasting of all of his campaigns the prince fell to his knees and renounced God. For that you killed him; I watched as you thrust your sword through his heart, in your rage. You killed your greatest friend, your dearest, only friend, that day on that field, and we returned to Rome."

Gabriel frowned. None of it seemed familiar, not a word of it, though Abraham had seemed sincere enough. "So why I don't I remember?"

Abraham smiled the smallest of small, sad smiles. "Because you wanted to forget," he said. "The weight of what you had done was almost too much to bear. And when we learned of what he had become once you had struck him down, you asked, you _prayed_ , to forget. Your prayer was answered. What you did not count upon, my brother, is that you would feel a desire to remember, to strive to regain what you had lost, and that every time that your memory was restored, you would pray again to forget."

That hardly made sense. "Only because of this friend?"

"That was the last of many bloody deeds that you committed for the Church, and perhaps to you the worst of them. But I think you wished to forget them all."

"And the friend?" he said, with a terrible ache of foreboding. "He was Vladislaus Dracula?"

Abraham nodded, and then he lifted his ale. Gabriel did the same, feeling that he needed it to steel his nerves. 

"The Church had sworn that we would be free of our long obligation after that war," Abraham continued then, in a low voice, perhaps a little sadly. "But when we learned of Dracula's demonic resurrection, I knew that we must stay and serve a little longer. You see, Gabriel - when we killed him, when _you_ killed him for the first time, we took on the responsibility of his continued existence in the world. Over the years I lost you, lost track of where you were, and thought perhaps that you would regain your memory. A few times there were that you did and you sought me out but always without a trace you vanished before we could leave together, and you again would lose your memory and lose yourself in the world. This time I could not wait for you to remember.” He paused, taking a long breath as he seemed to consider his words. “I learned that you were at work for the Church, for the Vatican, and I heard that you and Dracula had crossed paths again at last. I knew he would not be gone from the earth for a very long time, and so I sent Van Varenberg to you, his one last service before he could rest at long last. I came here, to this place where it began and where it must end. I thought perhaps I should tell you to try scattering his ashes this time, when he dies."

Gabriel remained silent. The story made such sense to him but he had no memory of it. What Abraham had told him fit with all he knew and with what Dracula himself had attempted to tell him. He almost believed it then, sitting there face to face with Abraham Van Helsing, the man who claimed to be his brother, but then he shook his head and wondered how he could have been so deceived. How could he trust a man that he'd known for less than a day? How could he believe in that story, seeing Abraham there perhaps fifty years old or more but certainly no veteran of the 15th century. It was ridiculous. Did he really think that he'd lived for over four hundred years and _asked_ to lose his memory?

"I don't believe you," he said, and stood. "I don't."

"Every word is true, on my honour. On the honour of our family."

But Gabriel shook his head and turned, and stumbled. He left the inn, not caring if he were followed because he could outrun them, he could, because there was all that anger and disappointment built up inside him coiled and awaiting release, to pump through his blood and his muscles as he ran without even knowing where he was running to or why. It didn't matter. He just ran. 

And then he stopped. He was back by the edge of the village, not far from the edge of the woods, his boots caked in snow and his coat hanging back in the inn. For a start as he sat there the cold didn't bother him, instead clearing his mind so that he could think, dissect their strange conversation and feel angry again. It was maddening that it all felt so true, that Abraham could be so convincing a liar as to make him almost believe that they were both of them over four hundred years old when that was patently absurd. And that made him think of Dorian who had deceived him also, and so skilfully. He felt a fool, that he could be so easily tricked into believing the tales of not one but two men that he barely knew. 

He sat on the stump of an old tree with his head in his hands, thinking how much simpler life had seemed when he had no brother, when Dorian Gray had not existed and all that he'd had was his work. All across Europe they called him a murderer, and though that stung him he knew where he stood, being used as he was by the Church to fight whatever evil in their name. He was accustomed to manipulation from Jinette and from the others, but this was a whole new world to him, this deception in the name of friendship. He wasn't sure that he had the stomach for it; whatever else he was, Gabriel Van Helsing was not a liar. 

Time passed and he grew cold sitting in the clear and freezing air, so he rose and made his way into the village. It reminded him of Anna's village, across the river, with its strangely shaped houses and its muddy streets, its inhabitants who dressed in the same manner and regarded him with the same guarded suspicion if not with the same presence of pitchforks. From outside the small village hall, between the buildings, he could see the tallest tower of Castle Frankenstein. He shivered and ducked inside the church to escape the cold. 

There was no priest. He learned from the boy who was halfway up a long ladder cleaning the windows that the old priest had died, taken by Dracula's brides, and had never been replaced. Now all they had was the large Latin Bible and a storekeeper who understood enough to read it on a Sunday. The story was oddly disheartening. He took a pew and sat there, trying not to think too much about it, or indeed about anything else. 

He wished that he hadn't come. He wished that he'd told Van... that infuriating man in London to leave and hadn't taken the letter. He wished he'd not set foot into France, to Paris, to that masquerade ball. He wished he'd never, ever met Dorian Gray or Abraham Van Helsing, and most of all he wished, now that he had done all of that, that he could leave. But wishing helped nothing. He was there to finish the job that he'd started, with Carl and Anna Valerious. Dracula had to die, but that didn't preclude a short while longer sitting in the church, dwelling on facts he couldn't change. 

It was a small church, quite old and possibly the only building in the village made from stone. There were candles lit about the room that cast eerie shadows through it, much like he'd seen in every church to which he'd paid a visit. He sighed deeply and went forward, dipping to cross himself before veering off to the side and lighting two candles - one for Anna and one for her brother Velkan. He hoped that heaven kept her safe so she would never have to know they'd failed. And then he sat back down. 

Carl came. The doors opened and the candle flickered in the rush of air but remained stoically alight; Carl came up the aisle and stood beside him, playing with his rosary in his hands. Finally, though he didn't feel he wanted to, Gabriel looked up. 

"Is there something I can do for you, Carl?" he asked, raising his eyebrows, wishing that he'd been left alone though simultaneously glad of the company. 

"Come back to the inn," Carl said, giving him a terribly concerned look. "I'm not going to ask what it was that your brother said to you..."

"Do I even know that he's my brother?"

Carl frowned and otherwise completely ignored the question. "I'm not going to say that I don't want to know because I do, but considering the situation I do think it's best that you come back to the inn, Van Helsing."

Carl was using his authoritative tone that almost made Gabriel smile. Almost. "Why, exactly?"

"Because we still need to discuss how exactly we plan to kill Dracula."

Carl had him there; he sighed melodramatically and pulled himself up from the pew that was, admittedly, becoming quite uncomfortable. Carl smiled a smug, satisfied smile, and they left the church together. 

The inn lay almost opposite the church and took roughly thirty seconds to reach in long strides across the square; they stepped inside, stamped off most of the snow from their feet and then Carl went over to the table there in the otherwise completely deserted room at which Abraham was sitting. Reluctantly, Gabriel joined them. 

They talked. Soon Gabriel had put aside his reservations and the three of them sat there attempting to hammer out a solid plan; they knew from Gabriel's first-hand experience that stakes and crucifixes had little effect, and Anna had told him that holy water had also failed. It seemed that shooting and burning were also quite without result, so what that left them with was their previous plan, which had the unfortunate flaw of meaning that one of them would have to be bitten by a werewolf, and Dracula probably did not have a vast quantity of syringes full of antidote just lying around in his castle. Also, where exactly were they to find a werewolf, and how could they have one of them bitten and infected but not killed? It was a terrible, terrible plan, deeply flawed at very best. 

Then, after much discussion, and hot stew and bread brought to them by the innkeeper, Abraham formed a new plan. 

"We dismember him," he said. 

Gabriel frowned. "And?"

"And we chop him up. Then we burn him, and divide up his ashes into, perhaps, six parts. We each of us take with us two parts and scatter them in two different locations; in that way he will be unable to return."

It was really quite stunning in its simplicity; they didn't really need to kill him at all, just to keep him from ever returning. Of course, it did have one very obvious flaw. 

"You make it sound so simple," Gabriel said. 

Abraham shrugged, sipping his wine. "It _is_ simple," he said. "However there is a strong possibility that we all shall die before we ever have the opportunity to swing a sword."

"And this is a _good_ plan?" Carl asked.

Both Van Helsings turned to look at Carl. "Unless you want to be bitten by a werewolf or let the spawn of Satan walk the earth affronting God for all eternity."

"Ah." Carl smiled sheepishly. "Does this plan, err, require my presence, as it were?"

Gabriel almost rolled his eyes and shared a look with Abraham before he could help himself. Considering all that Carl had done on their previous visit... "Yes, Carl, you can stay here," he said. 

And so it was decided; perhaps it was not a fool-proof plan, not by any means, but it was the best they knew, and so they would march right up to Castle Dracula and attempt to hack him limb from limb then burn him to ashes. Something was bound to go wrong, of course, but they did have to try. Even if the weight of a murder dating back four hundred years was _not_ upon him, Dracula was still very much his responsibility. In the morning, they would leave for the last house of the Valerious family, and the gateway to Dracula's castle. 

Abraham and Carl both retired after dinner but Gabriel, who had slept so long the previous night, felt he couldn't sleep. He sat up by the fire and thought. Soon, he hoped, the business of Dracula's extermination would be done with, and then he would return to London, to his home and his bed and walls lined with portraits of faces he didn’t know. He was tired; tired of the work and the Church, of the wanted posters and being labelled a killer when the priests in the Vatican assured him that what he did was God's work. 

He just wanted to rest. Perhaps soon he would.


	15. The Clearing in the Wood

He knew that he was dreaming. 

He knew that he was dreaming because he did not remember falling asleep in that chair by the fire; he was certain that he'd trudged wearily up the stairs of the inn and crawled into his bed, and now there he was back by the fire in that worn chair, dressed and watching as the wood smouldered in the hearth, the flames dying down. The room was so cold then and he shivered, feeling it right down to his bones. He rose and crossed the room, plucking his coat from the stand where it hung and pulling it on quickly around him in a swirl of leather. After the first momentary chill he knew that the thick leather would warm him. 

He meant to go to the stairs. Though he knew he was dreaming he wanted to climb the stairs and go to his room, lie down and drift off to sleep, though he was unsure if it was possible at all to sleep in dreams. The question, however, remained unanswered, as he went instead to the door. He opened it, and stepped outside. 

The village was quiet and the air was entirely still as he passed through it, walking away to the woods with no real understanding of why he was doing what it was that he was doing. It didn't matter, he knew, because on some perfectly obscure level it made absolute sense to him, knowing as he did that each night he dreamt of the woods outside that village, that he had done so for weeks. That was where he was going, striding swiftly through the frosty streets away from the inn to the dark woods at the edge of the village. It wasn't long before he was there, standing on the patch of limp green grass at the border of it. He only hesitated for a moment before striding in. 

Twigs and matted undergrowth cracked and rustled beneath his feet as he walked, but that had no meaning; he seemed to understand that with the logic of dreams his actions could do nothing to affect the final outcome, and so the noise he made was of no consequence at all. Even had he stayed there by the inn's dying fire his dream would have come to him, and it seemed to be a nobler thing to stride out through the night to meet it than to wait meekly in a comfortable chair in a warm room. He had to admit, though, as the forest grew denser and the branches began to claw at him, that the chair would probably have been the wiser option. Still, he pressed on. 

It was as if he knew what to expect. He was not at all surprised as a sharp branch caught him by the line of his eyebrow and brought forth blood that trickled into his eye; he wiped it away on the back of his hand and continued, his feet snagging on tree roots and creeping plants along the ground, the branches clawing at him, threatening to knock away his hat, pulling at his hair, scoring faint lines in the leather of his coat. It was all so very familiar, as though he'd been there before. Perhaps it was that sense of déjà vu that summoned up the dread in him, or perhaps a little more. 

He stepped out after what seemed like an hour of that walking and perhaps it had been an hour but he didn't think to check. He'd expected there to be a full moon in the sky and there wasn't, which confused him. He expected to see a stake in the centre of that clearing, tall and lit up in the moonlight, but there was nothing there. But he felt there was _something_ , just as he felt that there was something terribly wrong. 

Then he saw her. She was so faint, so thin, almost as a wisp of smoke on the air, but he could make out her shape in the moonlight. She was standing at the other side of the clearing, wearing a red dress and white satin gloves that stretched up to her elbows. And she was trying to say something, her rouged lips moving but emitting no sound at all. He moved closer, frowning, wiping again at the cut above his eye that was causing his vision to blur. She was gesturing now, almost wildly, but it seemed to make no sense. Then the wind rose, and in the moment before the rain burst forth in a crack of thunder loud as cannon fire, she found her voice. 

"Run," she said, her eyes pleading. But it was too late. 

The gathered clouds burst overhead and poured forth an icy, biting torrent. The thunder cracked and he jerked around dumbly to gaze up at the origin of that sound, only to find himself blinded by a sudden and tremendous flash of lightning. When he spun back, his wet hair whipping at his face, to where Anna had stood, she was gone. But he was by no means alone. 

His stomach lurched sickly and he felt he wanted to screw shut his eyes but found himself unable. There was nowhere to run because the rain obscured his path, wiped his footprints from the ground so that he had no way of knowing which way it was that he had come. And then he felt the touch upon his shoulders and knew that soon it would be over. Dracula had found him. 

"I knew you would be waiting, Gabriel," the count whispered to him, somehow audible over all of the din about him, his lips just beside Gabriel's ear. Then he tossed aside his hat, which was caught by the wind and carried spinning away. He was powerless in his grasp, chilled, staring out into the icy black darkness through the glittering curtain of rain as he was held there, immobile, held by more than just those infinitely powerful white hands. It was Dracula's thrall, and he was in it. 

The whole world seemed dark as he turned then, was turned, a vast ocean of nothingness that existed only in those moments when the lightning split the sky. There was no moon, no stars, nothing but the grasp that held him and for terrible instants the fathomless shining eyes of the creature before him. He knew exactly what was to come but, shivering, he still struggled. But only in the beginning. Soon he felt too weak to struggle. 

There was no frenzy, no wild beating of his heart to accompany the end, and somehow he had known it would be so. In all that swirling, raking darkness he was the calm, still eye, even as he felt the life flow from him; he was peace despite the terror, the disgust. As Dracula held him then, his cold hands in his wet hair and his mouth pressed at his throat, all that he felt was warmth despite the bitter cold. It was one exquisite, terrifying moment. But something was wrong. 

As he faded, as the calm was shattered in him and replaced with all the chaos of the swirling, rain-swept winds, he knew; this was not a dream. 

This was _not_ a dream.


	16. Castle Dracula

He woke slowly, swimming in semi-consciousness for some considerable time before he was able to drag himself up and into the waking world. Slowly his eyes opened and adjusted to the low, dim light. Slowly, almost absently, he wondered where he was; he was used to the feeling of confusion on waking, so often in a different place from day to day or week to week, had grown accustomed to staring blankly at a dank hotel room until it dawned on him where exactly in the world he was. This time it was wholly different, as unlike all those other mornings, lying in a bed until he remembered how he'd come to be there he knew that he'd not brought himself to this place. But he knew where he was: Castle Dracula. 

He sprang from the bed and ran to the door, over the floor that was wet from the melting icicles that hung from the ceiling above him. He grasped the handle but the door was locked as he'd felt almost sure that it would be, and when he tried to force it open, charging with his arm and his shoulder, it wouldn't give. It was a thick, old oak door, locked and probably also barred from the other side. Charging at it had hurt, sending sharp spikes of pain through his already bruised arm, and he felt so weak, so tired, so drained... He sank to his knees as if in slow motion, his head coming to rest against the heavy, immovable wooden door. 

Everything that had happened the previous night he remembered, from waking in the chair by the dying fire to striding out so purposefully into the woods, from the cold inside the inn to the warmth he felt in that clearing, in Dracula's dead arms. He remembered how it had felt just like a dream and how he'd been drawn by that feeling out into the woods, unarmed and strangely unafraid. And with a sick lurch he remembered Dracula's teeth as they grazed against his throat, as they sank down into his yielding flesh. 

Quickly, as quickly as his weakened form would allow, he reached up at his neck. Then, with just a little shuddering hesitancy, he touched the tips of his fingers to that spot. He could feel the marks, bloody and raw, left by Dracula's bite. He gasped in a sharp breath and sank down harder against the door. He'd been bitten. It was all true. 

"You're not going to die, you know," said a voice from across the room. "And you won't turn into a vampire, either, so all that you actually have to worry about it him killing you. I'd say you have a good week or so before he tires of you."

Slumped against the door, he turned his head and opened his eyes; he wanted to stand but it seemed all his energy had vanished, evaporated from him in his attempt to escape. "Hello, Dorian," he said weakly, his voice a low creak barely above a whisper. "I wondered when I'd see you again."

A small smile spread on Dorian's lips as he sat there across the room by the window, his grey suit immaculate and his long legs crossed at the knee. "Well, here I am," he said. 

Gabriel closed his eyes, feeling strangely unsurprised though perhaps that was due to his lack of energy rather than any actual lack of surprise; he'd imagined Dorian on his way back to Paris or London, back to a life of decadence, not waiting for him in a locked room in Transylvania, or wherever it was that Castle Dracula actually physically stood. But he was there, beautiful as ever, serene and unchanging, his very presence taunting him. 

Then Dorian moved, splashing his way over the wet floor. Soon he was there by Gabriel’s side and though he wanted to struggle against his grasp, he simply couldn't muster the energy. Instead he muttered meekly as Dorian hauled him to his feet and walked him across the room, laying him down on the wide, canopied bed. Then he retreated to the chair across the room, and they returned to silence. 

Gabriel didn't understand his presence there, feeling groggy, his mind clouded and slow as thinking through thick treacle. He sighed and struggled to pull himself up a little on the bed, to rest against the pillows at an angle from which he could see the room, and felt entirely exhausted when his action was complete. His apparent weakness was almost painful. 

The room was of a fair size, each stone wall wet with the water of the melting ice; there were torches lit around the walls that kept up the heat in that place which would have otherwise been frozen and lit the room with eerie dancing shadows. The walls were otherwise blank and empty, except for the wall by which Dorian was sitting, which housed the long, high window through which a very little light was filtered, flat and grey as the sky outside. And aside from the large, canopied, four-poster bed upon which Gabriel was lying, and the chair were Dorian sat, there was precious by way of little furniture: a dresser, a small table, a second matching chair by the window. It was a bare, absolutely inhospitable room, not that Gabriel had expected any more or any different. 

He lay there, still, fully dressed with the exception of his coat and his pocket watch. It could have been an hour or more that he stared from the bed on the edges of consciousness, staring over at Dorian who remained just as still as he. With the way he was feeling he had apparently been stripped of the concept of time; it could have been hours of blankness, listening to the crackle of the torches and the pumping of blood in his veins, before Dorian finally moved. He rose from the chair and drew the heavy black embroidered drapes across the window, then walked to the door and knocked. Soon, it opened. 

"He'll be with you soon," he said, without turning to him, and then slipped from the room. And to the sound of the turning of the key, Gabriel slipped from consciousness. 

When he woke, he was on fire. It seemed that before as he'd lain there he'd felt so very little, that his every sense had been muted, but now... now his senses were set alight just as the torches that flamed against the walls. His breath came to him so freely now, warm air filled with the smell of fire, and he opened his eyes to look upon his captor. 

"You slept so long, Gabriel," said the count, who was sitting there at the foot of the bed. As if by instinct Gabriel kicked out at him, but as he had known that he would be, Dracula was just too fast; in a second he appeared right by his side. "That is no way to repay my hospitality."

"Hospitality?" Gabriel sat up in the bed, fixing his gaze on Dracula's white face. "You're holding me captive."

Dracula smiled with an odd, disarming sincerity. "That, perhaps, is true," he said, in that thick Romanian accent, with his crystal clear English and his low voice. "But that does not mean that I cannot be a good host." He gestured to the table by the window and cautiously Gabriel glanced over at it, finding a large silver tray there covered with meats and fruits and wine, just the sight of which made his mouth water in spite of his present circumstance. "Go, eat. I expect that you must be hungry."

When Gabriel didn't move he gestured again with one pale hand and a look of expectation on his face. Gabriel _was_ hungry; eventually he left the bed and walked across the floor - now quite dry - to the table where he seated himself and began to eat quite hungrily, ignoring the count completely as he joined him in the second chair and crossed his legs with their high black boots at the knee, reminding him of someone else. It was his guess that were Dracula intending to kill him immediately he would have found a more entertaining way to do so than by poison, so he could at least dine and then die on a full stomach. 

"I am glad that I did not kill you on your last visit," said Dracula almost thoughtfully, breaking the tenuous silence between them. 

"Strange," Gabriel replied, not looking up as he spoke between bites of a large leg of lamb; the heightening of his senses had dulled somewhat but the food still tasted marvellous. "I wish I _had_ killed you."

"Ah, such humour. I knew that there was a reason I allowed you to live." Gabriel bit back a sarcastic retort and took a sip of the wine. "You have been away so long. Oh, and I hope you do not mind so much that I took back my ring."

This time Gabriel did look up at him, as he held up his hand to show off the ring that he wore there, the silver ring with the crest that Gabriel had always assumed was his. It was strange to see it on another hand and especially Dracula's, especially when it looked like it belonged there. He couldn't even muster a meek complaint. And then, as if an accident, he glanced up into Dracula's eyes; for a moment they were black as night, without any trace of white, pupils that filled the whole eye before he blinked and brought back some normalcy to his gaze. Gabriel dropped the lamb back to the plate. Suddenly his appetite was ruined. 

"I don't want you to fear me," Dracula said. "That is not why I brought you here."

"So why _am_ I here?"

Dracula rose, slowly, and left his seat, pacing slowly across the room with his hands tucked back at the base of his spine. "I want you to remember," he said. "While you are here with me. And I will see to it that you cannot forget."

Strangely, the idea was not as repulsive as Gabriel had expected it would be; in fact, he _wanted_ to know, wanted to regain what he'd lost, in spite of what Abraham had told him. He knew, _knew_ , that no matter what he'd done he would never have asked to forget. Nothing could be so very terrible, not when he'd done what he'd done since then. Not that he'd comply. Not even a wish as deep as the knowledge of his past could compel him. 

Or so he thought. 

He was watching as Dracula walked back across the room as he felt it, a strange sort of curiosity welling inside him. He watched the count's movements just a little more intently then, noticing the fluidity with which he moved, how unnatural it seemed. He stood, so that he could watch more closely, almost staring then as the count moved toward the far wall with a strange, unsettling grace that was found nowhere in nature. He stepped toward him, watching the heels of the count's leather boots as they struck the floor. And then he stopped, and Gabriel stopped. He realised then far too late that he was in Dracula's thrall. 

Dracula turned and seized him by the shoulders, the pain of it coupled with his now renewed weakness rendering him unable to move. The last thing he saw as each of the torches blew out was Dracula's long canines as they swept toward his throat. And then all was black. 

Somewhere in the midst of swirling euphoria and stricken disgust, he passed out there in the dark. And Dracula caught him.


	17. Searching

Abraham Van Helsing had the appearance of a man of fifty-six; he stood roughly six feet tall and wore his lengthy silver-grey hair loose around his shoulders, had sharp blue eyes that glinted with just a hint of mischief and though not exactly wealthy, he could have dressed with a great deal more style than he actually did. The elbows of most of his jackets and shirts were wearing slightly thin and the most expensive item of jewellery he wore was his silver pocket watch. His colleagues called him eccentric. He just had no time for fashion. 

He was a medical doctor who had taught here and there and after a long while in London had moved off to Paris to 'pursue other interests.' His other interests were chiefly the destruction of the unholy undead known as Vladislaus Dracula and the continued well-being of his younger brother, Gabriel, without whom he was convinced he could not defeat his enemy. That morning he faced the very real possibility that Gabriel was lost, and so his quest was doomed to fail. 

It did not become apparent until half past nine that Gabriel was not where he should have been. Abraham had been awake then for a little more than an hour but hadn't yet thought to wake his brother, remembering the days when they'd shared a home and that Gabriel had always been a late riser, preferring the dark of night to the daylight. But as the morning wore on, Abraham grew a little impatient and went to Gabriel's room to wake him; when he didn't answer to his calls and knocks, Abraham went inside and found that Gabriel was gone. 

He called Carl, who had no idea where he was, either. He called the landlady, but all that she could tell him was that at almost midnight she'd seen him sleeping soundly in the chair by the fire. He was obviously not there any longer, and his coat and hat were both gone, but he could not have left the inn because his weapons were all still lying in his room. It didn't make sense that he'd leave without them, or without telling anyone that he was going. Still, he must have done just that, because he just wasn't there. 

So they looked for him. Abraham supposed that there were only so many places that he could have gone to in a village of that size, and so he and Carl split up to search; between them they checked every street and alley, every room in the inn, the village hall and the church, and thanks to the brief early morning snowfall there wasn't even so much as a footprint to point them in the right direction. It was disheartening to say the least - they'd travelled clear across Europe and Abraham had waited so long, so had Gabriel if he could have only remembered, and now hope - and Gabriel - was gone. 

It was desperation that turned the two of them to the woods, not any real expectation that they would find any trace that he'd been there. As they walked Carl began to theorise out loud - perhaps he'd left and gone home though that was unlikely, perhaps he'd gone on ahead which seemed unlikely also. Perhaps he'd been taken. Perhaps he'd developed a sudden case of somnambulism and was lying helpless in the woods... Abraham didn't dislike Carl exactly, but he started to wonder how Gabriel coped with him on such a regular basis. 

Then they came to the clearing. There was a smattering of snow dashed across the earth and the place was eerily quiet; Abraham had learned that quiet was often not the best of signs. Carl tottered off to the other side of the clearing and Abraham glanced down at the ground around where he was standing, not exactly filled with the greatest expectation of his long life. But then a gust of wind blew through the trees with a strange low whistle and he saw something stir. Obviously Carl had also spotted it, as they both walked in that direction, Abraham's hand coming to rest on the butt of his pistol. 

It was Gabriel's hat. His hand left the pistol and he picked it up, dusting off the light layer of snow from it with one gloved hand. Definitely Gabriel's hat, and though Abraham remained reserved, every trace of mounting dismay disappeared from Carl's face. 

They were spurred on somewhat by the discovery, but they found nothing else all that afternoon. Carl looked resolutely miserable as they made their way back to the inn to ward off frostbite by the fireside and Abraham was unsurprised when the landlady informed them that there had been no sign of Gabriel in the village, either. Abraham just sighed to himself as he sat warming his hands from the chair by the fire. Of all the things he'd imagined could go wrong, this had certainly been a long way down his list. 

The landlady brought the two of them some stew and wine and they ate in a miserable silence. What a wasted day. What a terrible circumstance. He had waited so long only to have his hopes dashed to pieces, as he should have known they would be. All there was left to do was trudge off to his hired room and attempt to drown his disappointment in a mug of sharp red wine, wondering what on earth had become of his brother. 

Perhaps he'd leave for Paris in the morning. Or, perhaps, he’d go to his death and to Dracula without him.


	18. The Picture of Dorian Gray

The bed was warm and soft and he lay sprawling in it, under the heavy sheets and blankets. He stretched, hearing several satisfying cracks from various and sundry body parts, and then he opened his eyes; he'd woken in such a good humour, but that was wiped from him starkly and immediately. He remembered where he was. 

He hauled himself up in the bed until he was sitting up, leaning back against the pillows and the headboard behind him, and almost wheezing, breathless from the effort. Obviously there was no waking with gloriously heightened senses this time, just the weakness that he understood came from the bite and the subsequent blood-loss. He did _not_ want to think about where that lost blood now was. 

The curtains were drawn back and the room was bathed in that same flat grey light to which he was fast becoming accustomed, let in from the overcast sky by the room's one long, high window. It looked wrong for the room, strangely out of place, that of course being if anything about an icy fortress to which an unholy creature had been banished could be considered the norm. He looked around, his neck aching, and he had a good though thoroughly appalling idea why. He found Dorian sitting there, by the door. 

Dorian's presence there still seemed odd and inexplicable, though he was slowly becoming accustomed to it. In fact, the strangest thing about him being there that day - he couldn't tell if it was the morning or the afternoon but it was definitely daytime - was that he was sitting on the floor. He had his long legs stretched out in front of him and crossed at the ankle, his back pressed against the wall and his nose in a book; apparently he'd finished reading Dante's _Inferno_ , as Gabriel could just make out that this new book was the second part, Dante's _Purgatorio_. Gabriel watched as he read the next two pages, feeling just a little too weak to do much else besides, and then he slipped a silver marker between the pages and looked up, shutting the book with a snap. 

"Well, it's about time," he said, setting the book down on the stone floor beside him, in front of something there leaning up against the wall. "You've been asleep for hours."

Gabriel frowned. "What time is it?" he asked, almost surprised at just how normal his voice sounded, not weakened at all. 

Dorian plucked his watch from his waistcoat pocket. "Almost eleven o'clock," he said. "I've been sitting here waiting for you to wake since six."

"Excuse me if I don't give a damn."

Dorian smiled suddenly, apparently amused by this, all white teeth and that false impression of youthful innocence that was so very deceptive. "I suppose that I asked for that," he said. "But I did _not_ come here to apologise to you."

"I didn't expect you to."

"Then that makes things easier. But just so you know, Gabriel, though I stand by everything that I've done, that does not mean to say I do not have certain... regrets."

"My heart bleeds."

"I expect that it shall, when the count has tired of you." Dorian sighed, smoothing his hands down over his thighs. "But I came to tell you a story. I don't expect that you'll believe it, and I don't expect you to comment on it; all that you have to do is lie there and listen, and considering your current condition, you would most likely find it difficult to do much else."

Gabriel made no verbal reply but glared slightly in response. Dorian smiled, that same familiar and disarming smile. 

"Then I'll begin.

"I was little more than twenty years old when I met Basil Hallward. He was an agreeable sort of a man and I liked him - I suppose that even at the worst of times I liked him, though at the end he seemed a nuisance and a monstrous bore. I don't suppose that he could help it, that being his nature. 

"But, despite his faults, I did like Basil. He was an artist, a painter, and he was truly quite talented in his own way, though it seems to me that all great artists must in turn be rather mediocre people, whose art reflects the life that they _don't_ live. That may be why, though I am an adequate pianist, I can never be _great_ \- I live my life aloud, Gabriel, and so my music will remain sadly mediocre. Unlike dear Basil's art.

"It seemed that all his life Basil had been lacking just that extra something that would make his good art great, and then of course he chanced to meet me. I don't mean for it to sound so vain as that, but when we met his art did change; it seemed that he'd been lacking a muse, and whether I should be ashamed of the fact or not, I found that I was it. He dearly loved to paint me, and though at the time I was little more than a child and perfectly immune to his flattery, I posed for him. His painting improved markedly. Everyone who saw it said so. 

"And then came his masterpiece; he never painted anything quite like it before or after that. It was my portrait, and when I looked at it that afternoon... I won't try to explain how it looked because it is much simpler to say that it looked then just as I do now, the picture of youthful innocence just awakened to the knowledge of its own beauty. I knew that I would never be so beautiful as I was then, and the unfairness of it struck me brutally. My picture would never age, but I would; I would wrinkle and fade, my face a catalogue of all my years and all my sins. 

"I think you can see where this story is leading, Gabriel.

"You asked me in Berlin how I came to be invulnerable as I am now. The simple answer is that I asked for it. I asked that my picture age instead of me, and it has. Years now, _years_ , and I still appear as I did that day, even after all this time and all the things I've done. My soul is in that painting. I've killed to protect it, lied, stolen. Through that picture I'm immortal."

Then he stood, and straightened out his jacket, adjusted his necktie, and didn't take his eyes from Gabriel for a second. "Dracula took the painting," he said. "Had I not done exactly as he asked and brought the book to him, he would have destroyed it, and me with it. Obviously I could not allow that to happen."

He sighed deeply, leaning back against the wall, and Gabriel frowned, not quite willing to mention what he now knew about the book. 

"But I don't want you to think that I'm a good person beneath it all, somewhere deep inside," Dorian continued, his gaze drifting to the window. "You always knew that I wasn't, and I'm not. I'd have betrayed you sooner or later even had Dracula not stolen my painting." He glanced back at Gabriel, then returned his gaze to the window. "As I said, I don't expect you to believe me - who would? It's such a fantastic story, and you've no memory to speak of. But perhaps..."

He stooped, picked up the thing that had been resting beside him; it was the size and shape of a picture, and he held it with the front to his chest. "I have something to show you." He turned and propped the thing against the wall. Then, with one last glance in Gabriel's direction, he strode off to the door. A brief knock, then he was gone. And Gabriel was alone with the painting. 

For a moment he just couldn't look at it, and lay there in the bed with his gaze averted. But his eyes were drawn to it, over the floor and the walls and the few items of furniture until at last he saw it. It was everything that Dorian had promised. 

It was, perhaps, the single most terrible thing that Gabriel had ever seen. The face in the painting was gnarled and ancient, glaring out at him with tired, hateful eyes. There were no words to describe it, except that he knew, _knew_ , that this terrible thing was what should have filled that void inside Dorian where his soul ought to have dwelled. This twisted, hideous thing _was_ Dorian's soul. It seemed so dreadfully familiar. And he couldn't look away. 

He had no idea how long it was that he stared, picking out in that picture every shade of sin the world had ever known, marking the face already ravaged by age. He stared. He wished that he could look away but found that he could not. He wished that Dorian would reappear to take it with him - why had he even left it there with him, if harming it would harm _him_? Gabriel could tear it, smash it, throw it from the room's high window, and that would be the end of Dorian Gray. Except, of course, for the fact that he could barely move for his infuriating leaden limbs. 

So he lay there and stared, understanding somehow that everything that Dorian had said to him was true, knowing somehow that those bloody stains on the portrait's hands were from the blood of Basil Hallward. Dorian had always liked him, even at the worst of times. He wished he knew how it was that he knew. He wished that he could look away. 

And then Dorian returned. He strode back into the room, lit all of the torches and drew the curtains, picked up the book that he'd left there and tucked the painting under his arm. He didn't say a word or even glance in Gabriel's direction until he reached the door. Even then he didn't turn to him. 

"He'll be coming soon," he said, and slipped from the room; the door locked behind him. 

It was strange, but knowing that the count was coming to him seemed considerably less chilling this time.


	19. Perseverance

Abraham lay in bed, trying not to think, but for a man of his intellectual disposition that was almost entirely impossible and especially considering the circumstances in which he was currently to be found. His usually optimistic nature had been eclipsed by a feeling of almost total resignation due to his brother’s disappearance; everything for which he had planned now seemed doomed to failure, and though not ordinarily disposed to bouts of self-pity it was in total, unabashed self-pity that he remained in bed. He was trying not to think. 

He found that the harder he tried to clear his mind and lie there blankly, the more recent events sprang forth; most frequently he dwelt on his brother, Gabriel, and the great amount of reliance he had upon him to fulfil their vow to the Church and destroy Dracula. How foolish he had been to factor Gabriel so very strongly into his plans! There was not and had never been a way to secure his participation with any certainty, though until his disappearance everything had unfolded more or less as planned. Now he was gone and the plan had failed. It had taken that failure to bring Abraham to the realisation that he should have learned to do without his brother long ago.

He wanted someone to blame. He could have blamed Gabriel, who had no memory of his past to speak of and who he could not even be sure believed he was his brother. He wanted to blame Carl or the landlady of the village’s small inn in which they were lodged, but found that he could not; if he himself had not prevented Gabriel’s disappearance then how could he expect anyone else to have done so? He wanted to blame whatever agent had stolen Gabriel away, but though he felt sure that such an agent did indeed exist he had little evidence as to who or what it had been. And he wanted to blame Dorian Gray, though he could not say exactly why. 

Lying beneath the blankets of his bed, he thought of Dorian. Though he had found him intriguing, due to his rather unusual physical properties, he had never actually _liked_ him and had definitely not trusted him in any small measure. Considering all that he knew of him, how could he? Perhaps others were taken in by his looks and his grace and that strange air of innocence he lived within, but knowing what he did, Abraham had never been so taken in. Still, Dorian had served a purpose, bringing Gabriel to him though committing an act of betrayal in the process. He had hoped that given Dorian’s history with Gabriel he might have resisted, though he’d been almost sure that any faith put in him would have been severely misplaced. Still, suspicious of Dorian Gray as he was, he could not quite bring himself to believe that he was responsible for Gabriel’s vanishing. So, he could not exactly blame him either. 

In the end the pity was too much for his optimistic if ultimately weary soul and he clambered out of bed. He sighed and washed and dressed and went down to breakfast at almost half past ten and picked at his food distractedly. The innkeeper seemed to be worried, though he barely registered this. Carl also seemed worried, judging by the anxious glances that he cast across the table and the strange silence to which he adhered, though Abraham felt that his worry was more for the younger Van Helsing than himself. 

“We should go over to the other village, just to check that he isn’t there,” Carl said eventually, breaking the tense silence. Abraham sighed and then mutely nodded his agreement, though he felt very little enthusiasm for the plan. Gabriel would not be there.

They left, the two of them, spent the rest of the morning finding the very best place to cross the river and then riding to the village that housed the manor of the Valerious family. The villagers were glad to see Carl and told him in exaggerated whispers of Dracula’s return, but not a one of them had seen Gabriel. Carl thanked them as Abraham looked silently on and then they left again to return to the inn before dark, Carl assuring the villagers as they rode away that soon Dracula would bother them no more. Abraham felt, sagging in his saddle, that Carl’s words had been misleading to say the very least. 

But they found when they returned that several of the inhabitants of the village where they were staying were waiting for them in the inn. Carl, who had been biting back his bitter disappointment since they’d found that there was no word of Gabriel, seemed suddenly brimming with enthusiasm. Though still sceptical himself, Abraham had an idea why. 

“I just wish that I’d had the time to make more solar grenades,” muttered Carl, mostly to himself, as he ushered Abraham to a table around which the villagers crowded. Not that Abraham had any idea what a solar grenade actually was, but Carl’s renewed optimism was nevertheless extremely obvious and he supposed that, at least, was somewhat heartening. 

As it turned out, the villagers were there to offer their support, and not of the moral variety; they were ready to take up their scythes and their pitchforks and storm Dracula’s castle all by themselves if need be. It seemed that all it took to have them rally round was a leader they saw as strong and knowledgeable, such as the elder brother of the infamous Van Helsing, and he assumed that Gabriel’s previous, though temporary, success had also had an effect. Kill Dracula once and suddenly you have whole villages at your disposal, or the majority of the able-bodied men of _one_ village, at least. 

At first, though swayed somewhat by their zeal, he remained unconvinced that they could succeed. The villagers took that as a sign that he just required more enthusiasm on their part, and their hastily elected spokesperson went into a rather rousing speech on how Dracula had terrorised not only the village where the Valerious family had lived but also several villages up and down that stretch of the river, including theirs. Following Gabriel Van Helsing’s previous triumph and the subsequent peace, they felt they could not go back to living in fear, wondering who would be the vampires’ next meal. So, in the great tradition of the Transylvanian village lynch mob, they were willing to band together and storm the castle, risk life and limb to put down their local terror once and for all. 

Abraham listened mutely from behind a mug of ale. He wasn’t sure that one rather small and raggedy mob of villagers, no matter their zeal, could defeat the unholy undead, but then Carl pointed out that he hadn’t exactly been overflowing with optimism for the success of their previous plan, either. He sighed, finished off his ale and conceded the point. Then he nodded solemnly and told the villagers that they’d be leaving at daybreak, and to gather with their weapons by the well in the square. They would be going after Dracula. 

Then the mob dispersed. They filtered from the inn with their perplexingly high spirits and left Abraham alone at the table with Carl. He called for more ale – he had a feeling that he’d need it. 

“This is not a good plan, Carl,” he said, rubbing at his silver-grey three-day beard. 

“No, I suspect that you’re right,” Carl replied. “But it is, however, the only plan we have.”

Abraham smiled vaguely and nodded. “Yes, you’re right,” he said. “For a friar you have remarkable sense.”

“I’ll take that as a compliment.”

“Which is as it was meant.”

The ale arrived, along with two bowls of stew, piping hot, and a plate of bread. The landlady, who was a surprisingly good cook, disappeared into the kitchen and from there to her own part of the building, and Abraham and Carl ate in silence for a while. It was an amicable silence without any of that usual awkwardness, and Abraham wondered just when it was that he’d come to respect the overly optimistic yet also inexplicably sensible Catholic friar. After all, it wasn’t as though he had much faith left in the Catholic Church; once upon a time he’d had all the faith in the world, all the zeal of the villagers, all of Carl’s upbeat disposition toward life, but now he was tired. He’d been tired for a very long time. He just wanted to rest. 

“I’m getting too old for this,” he said, more to himself than to Carl, as they walked across the room to the chairs by the fireplace. There was a good fire blazing and he settled down to warm himself by it. 

Carl peered at him inquisitively as they took the chairs and settled back. “Exactly how old are you, if you don’t mind my asking?”

Abraham smiled and crossed his legs. “Old enough,” he said. “Rather older than my brother.”

Apparently Carl knew not to push, and nodded instead. “But Van… Gabriel _is_ your brother?”

“Oh, yes.” Abraham nodded, looking Carl in the eye as the twinkle returned to his own. “Half-brothers, yes – Gabriel is the son of our father’s second wife and I his first, but we were raised together. I bear him a brother’s love and should his memory return I should hope that he would say the same of me.” Then he grew silent, and could see from the look on Carl’s face that he knew what he was thinking. 

“Perhaps we’ll find him,” Carl said. “I’m sure he’s alive. Perhaps Dracula took him and we’ll find him there.”

Abraham nodded. “Yes, I’m sure that you’re quite right,” he said. “But that’s what I’m rather afraid of.”

Carl seemed ready to question him but remained silent as Abraham’s expression closed in markedly. He sighed and drank his ale and hoped that they would all live to see the end, but there was little hope. Some if not all of the villagers would surely die. Perhaps Carl or himself would die, also. Perhaps Gabriel was already dead. 

And if he wasn’t, well… Abraham reached up and touched the spot on his shirt that lay over the cross that he wore around his neck. If not, then God help them.


	20. In Another Life

Initially he woke with a start, though he was unable to say just what it was that startled him, and then he sank back down. He didn’t quite drift back to sleep but rather floated in that place between sleeping and waking where he still felt the warmth of his dreams though tainted at the edges by a subtle, gnawing influence of the waking world. He longed to creep back into sleep but reality was persistent and eventually, against his will, he woke. 

He opened his eyes and blinked in the dull daylight, remembering for a moment that glorious morning not so long ago when he’d woken in the warmth of the sun. The flatness of the light was so disheartening when taken in comparison and had already coloured his mood. He knew that it would be another dreary day and he would be dreary in it. Unlike Dorian, of course. 

Gabriel noted with a kind of offhand resignation that he was becoming rather accustomed to waking in Dorian’s presence, as he glanced over to his left and saw him sitting there against the wall. He seemed quiet and brooding as he read his book despite his perfect, flawless and unchanging beauty; Gabriel had thought such a look was simply not in his nature though the more he thought, he realised that once he had thought him incapable of murder, also, and had been proved wrong. All he needed to know of Dorian was in that painting. And it was hideous. 

“If he gave you back your picture,” Gabriel said slowly, “why are you still here?” He frowned then, watching as Dorian carefully marked his place and set aside the book then looked up at him quite deliberately with his disarming, alarming eyes. 

“The weather is foul,” he said, just as deliberately. “And I’m not especially fond of snow, so I’ll leave in the spring.”

Gabriel tried to nod but found his neck too stiff and that his head felt heavy. But he didn’t really need to nod, as he did not believe a word that Dorian had said. It was not because his look was lacking in sincerity, but there was something about him, the way he was sitting there day after day, that said there was more to it than he’d spoken. 

“I don’t believe you,” he said. “You’ve done nothing but lie to me since the day we met.”

Dorian nodded his agreement with a vague smile on his face but he didn’t seem amused. His long fingers brushed over the book at his side and he rested his head back against the wall. “If it helps, I _did_ save your life,” he said, and Gabriel frowned, tried to move to sit up, but felt himself utterly drained. He didn’t have to question why. 

“By killing a man?” he said. “A man who was probably on your side anyway? That just makes you a murderer, Dorian – don’t expect me to thank you for that.”

Dorian’s lips quirked for a second and then his placid expression returned. “I don’t deny it,” he said. “That man, if you can call him that, was in the count’s employ, yes. You think that he was trying to kill you, or to kill Frau Kurtz, but he was sent only for the book. And killing him was a mercy, believe me.”

“I knew you were callous, Dorian, but this is beyond belief.”

“For once I’m actually telling you the truth – the man was as good as dead even before I killed him. Remember his emaciation? He was almost a walking corpse thanks to Dracula and had I not spilled his blood he would have died of starvation soon after. He was Dracula’s slave, a ghoul, Dracula’s wish his command and the only purpose left in his life. I’m almost surprised that the same hasn’t happened to you, considering all the blood he’s taken from you.”

Gabriel had no reply, because what Dorian had said felt so inexplicably true. Of course, every word that passed Dorian’s lips _sounded_ true, no matter what it was that he said; he had to remember that. After Dorian, he wasn’t sure that he’d trust anyone again. 

He was not, as far as he knew, a very trusting man, and never had been. Even where his superiors were concerned he had some reservations, seeing as how he was to them simply a means to an end to be controlled through his guilt. He didn’t trust Abraham who said he was his brother, or Dorian who had lied to him, or Jinette in Rome or even Taylor, his butler back all those miles away in London. He didn’t trust the neighbours who said that house was his. He wasn’t even sure that he could trust himself, thinking of his lost memory. 

How he wished that he hadn’t left London, that he’d expelled that strangely forgettable man from his house and told the Church in no uncertain terms to go to hell. He could have stayed in that house he wasn’t sure was his, slept in that big, warm bed and kept his blood safely in his veins. He could have spent his days reading the books in the library, brushing his hands over the furniture, the little decorations, searching the faces of the portraits for something, _anything_ he might have recognised. Perhaps in time he would have remembered, seen something in a different light that would have brought flooding back all that he’d lost. Perhaps he would have gone mad from the uncharacteristic inaction, with something always missing like that space on the wall by the stairs. 

Oh. He looked over at Dorian, now back in his book, and felt the missing pieces click into place. 

“We knew each other,” he said. Dorian looked up and closed his book without marking the place, which was an indication of something at least. “Didn’t we. Before all this.”

Dorian shrugged. “How would you know?” he said. “You don’t remember.”

“No, I don’t, but the picture… there’s a space on my wall back in London. It’s the same size.”

Then Dorian smiled and set down his book. “Perhaps we did,” he said. “But you don’t believe a word I say, isn’t that right? I could tell you we were childhood friends or that we met the night before you lost your memory, that we were lovers or that maybe the only reason you knew me is that you bought my house. You wouldn’t believe a word of it, so what exactly is the point in telling you?”

“Perhaps if you tell the truth, I’ll remember.”

Dorian’s smile suddenly turned icy. “And what if you wanted to forget?”

Gabriel’s gaze was steely, despite his weakened state. “I want to know,” he said.

Dorian sighed and stretched and rubbed his eyes like languorous feline and brought up his knees on which he rested one arm. He sighed again and ran his gaze over the ceiling slowly, as if trying to decide something. Then he spoke. 

“I tried to do the right thing,” he said. “As I was taught to do. I followed you that first day, you know, when you arrived in Paris and went to Notre Dame. I wasn’t sure if you were brave or foolish going there, considering what you did to Henry Jekyll. You didn’t see me, of course. I made sure that you were admitted to the masquerade ball. The countess is a very sweet woman, and her butler owed me a considerable favour. But my betraying you was inevitable, when I knew that Dracula had my picture. It wasn’t a choice; it was a necessity. And I know you won’t believe me when I say that I do regret what’s passed, but there; I’ve said it to you anyway.”

Gabriel frowned and mustered just enough strength from his heavy, weakened limbs to haul himself up into a sitting position. So Dorian had followed him; he did remember feeling watched that afternoon, but that by no means leant any extra weight to whatever else he said. “You didn’t answer my question.”

“I was coming to it. You’re so impatient.” Dorian smirked for a second and then his countenance became serene, impenetrable. “This is not the first time that my painting has been stolen.” He took a long, deep breath. “It once hung on that wall, in that house. It was before we knew each other, in case you’d wondered if we lived there together, because we never did; it was my house before it was your house and my picture hung on the wall. But then it was stolen. Apparently somehow, and I’ve never found out exactly how, the Catholic Church learned my secret. You don’t think that you’ve ever met another Knight of the Holy Order, do you. You don’t think you even know their names, but you did once know because you knew me. The Church used me, held the picture over me and sent me to deal with their problems to atone for my sins or some such nonsense. We even worked together, once or twice, when the fancy struck Jinette or whoever was managing the games that particular season. You helped me steal back my painting, you know, and like a fool I stayed on with the Order because you asked me to. But then you saw something or heard something one day and when I saw you next, you were a gibbering, guilt-stricken wreck. You asked to forget, and you forgot. I gave you the house, signed the deeds in your name, and disappeared.”

“Why?”

For a moment Dorian seemed almost flustered by the question, but quickly his seemingly effortless composure returned. “Because you didn’t remember me,” he said. “I was only ever there because you asked it of me. If you didn’t, _couldn’t_ remember, then what exactly was the point in remaining? I went to Paris and I met another Van Helsing, one who had no issues with his memory and who never really believed that I was something that I’m not.” He tucked back his hair and tilted his head. “Because truly, no matter how much you wanted to believe it or how often you told me it was so, I’m not a terribly good person.”

“That I can believe.”

Dorian laughed. It was almost hysterical laughter, and Gabriel saw nothing even remotely amusing about the situation. Of course, inappropriate humour had always been one of Dorian’s most human if slightly worrying traits, but Gabriel wasn’t sure that even Dorian himself was amused. Not so much amused as… how on earth did he knew what Dorian was or wasn’t like? Suddenly Dorian’s laughter seemed cloying and surreal, and as suddenly as it had begun, it ceased. 

“Oh, I’m sorry,” Dorian said, tilting his head back against the wall. “I didn’t mean to laugh. It’s not a laughing matter, really.” Gabriel was inclined to agree. 

Then they both fell silent. Dorian seemed to be staring at the palms of his hands and Gabriel watched him, almost hoping that some vague memory might just pop into his head. It didn’t; all that he could think of, he found, was that last night before he’d left Rome, their infuriating silent dinner, Dorian reading the _Inferno_ while he lounged on his bed and… the rest. For a moment it was as though he could still feel Dorian’s flawless skin beneath his hands, and he wondered then if that was something that he’d felt before. How many times? His cheeks felt hot. He didn’t know. He didn’t even know he’d known him. After all, Dorian Gray serving the Church? The idea was ridiculous.

“So, we really knew each other?”

Dorian smiled faintly, the look out of place on a face that seemed as young as his – if Gabriel hadn’t known better he would have said his look was almost wistful. “Yes, Gabriel, we did.” He glanced up at him from the back of his hands, then shook his head and looked away. “For years.” He sighed, and shifted slightly, bringing up the other knee. “For years.”

“Then you could tell me…”

“I can tell you very little, actually. You see, when we first met you were suffering from a previous bout of your apparent amnesia, and I was… elsewhere when you first regained your memory. When we saw each other all that you told me was that you needed to find your brother, and the next thing, well, you were crawling up the steps of some church or other with no memory. I can’t even tell you what it is that Dracula wants with you. I’ve got no more answers for you, Gabriel.” He looked at him and gave a small wry smile. “And besides which, you know I’m a liar.”

If only Gabriel could have believed that what he’d told him was false. But in spite of all he knew, what logic told him, he believed every last word.

They returned to silence, unsure what else there was to say. Gabriel watched him for a while as he stared at the window and up at the flat grey sky, then his own gaze flickered to the window. He started to count the stones that formed the far wall. Then he stared at the untouched pitcher of wine, shifting uneasily in bed. He found that he couldn’t quite keep still, like there was something he needed to do or to finish, that an odd buzz of anticipation had fallen over him, and now his muscles felt somehow stronger he was more alert. Dorian eyed him strangely then seemed to realise something and brought himself to his feet, brushing dust and creases from his suit. 

“I should go,” he said. 

“He’s coming.” A wave of impatience washed over him suddenly, mixed with just the tiniest amount of dread. 

“Yes, he is.” There were footfalls in the stone corridor beyond the door. “If I should happen to… if I don’t see you, then…” He stopped and turned and shook his head, and knocked on the door. “It doesn’t matter. I doubt that you’ll give a damn by then.” And he left the room. 

Perhaps ordinarily Gabriel would have dwelt on what Dorian had said. Perhaps he would have found the words ominous and out of Dorian’s most serene character, or been stirred by them. As it was, there was not a question in him. Dracula was coming; that was all that he needed to know. He’d been waiting for him all along.


	21. A Night in Valerious Manor

They set out at dawn, as planned; Abraham, with Carl at his side or more accurately hanging back by his right elbow, strode out into the square at daybreak to meet the men. He’d had no expectations to speak of and felt neither pleased nor disappointed when he found that perhaps twenty men were waiting, considerably fewer than had so enthusiastically declared their support the previous evening. Abraham had a suspicion behind his small, knowing smile that perhaps the women of the village really held the power. 

They left and somewhat slowly as most of the men though plentiful in terms of pitchforks were somewhat lacking in horses. Still, as the villagers knew the area so well they made surprisingly good time. They strode down paths that Abraham would never have suspected led to where they were heading and which he felt he would probably never find again despite his numerous skills. Of course, his skills often lay in more academic directions. There was a reason he was a fully qualified medical doctor, after all. 

This was not to say that Abraham Van Helsing was in any way deficient in material matters, as that was not the case; he was a rather accomplished swordsman, though currently travelling without a sword, and a fair shot with a pistol or rifle. He’d killed before, and not just game. He may have been at heart an academic, but he was, as he looked, far from defenceless. Though he did wish with a worryingly large portion of both his heart and mind that Gabriel had been with them. Or even his old friend Van Varenberg, had he not released him from his vow. 

He’d found earlier that morning as he collected the weapons from Gabriel’s room in the pre-dawn darkness by the light of a lamp, that his brother had kept the letter he’d sent. It wasn’t simply knowing who had been sent with that letter that brought Klaus Van Varenberg to his mind, but also the fact that on the reverse Gabriel had written his name. He understood why; after Klaus had delivered the letter his debt had been paid, his oath fulfilled, and so he would rest and fade from memory. Perhaps the one person who would remember was Abraham, which was as it should be. He would have been glad to have Klaus with him, as in the old days. 

As he rode with the men by the banks of the river, he touched his hand to his jacket over the pocket where the letter lay. He’d written it in Paris before he’d left so suddenly for the east, and sealed it with a mark he’d barely seen and never once used for four hundred years. The seal of the Order of the Dragon brought back so many memories for him, and vainly he’d hoped against hope that it would help to restore memory to Gabriel. Obviously it had not. It had probably confused him somewhat, almost persuaded him that the planned meeting was a trap. Then, of course, he’d met Dorian and hastened into Germany, where Maria Kurtz had died. That was a shame – he’d never expected her death; after all, she had nothing to do with his plans, just a theologian with an interest in 15th Century Christianity. He’d been meaning to lend her his diaries from the time, not quite realising the importance that certain parties had placed on them. He had always assumed that interest to be a kind of perverse joke, until now. There was truly nothing of importance in them, in any of them. How cruel fate could be. 

Apparently the villagers didn’t remember the paths _quite_ as well as he’d been let to believe, because somehow they found themselves lost. It took almost an hour to find the way again, retracing their steps, and it was shortly after noon when they arrived at their destination. Abraham shook his head as he dismounted his horse and checked his pocket watch. The short cut had actually made the journey longer. Carl seemed to find it amusing, though admittedly his laughter was nervous and he was muttering something about those solar grenades that Abraham still didn’t understand and about which was rather disinclined to inquire. 

A couple of the men, or closer to five or six, had friends or family in the village and soon word spread of their arrival. The villagers there were slightly wary but led them all to Valerious Manor, which was now entirely deserted; strangely it was still filled with the belongings of the deceased occupants, since the people of the village apparently had too much reverence for the family to plunder it, or at least too much superstition. They were seated at the banquet table and were brought food and wine, and by the time that the meal and the reunions were complete, it was almost two o’clock. Abraham resigned himself to the fact that the day had been rather wasted, and that they would move on to Castle Dracula in the morning. Moving on it in the darkness was simply too foolish a move to contemplate. 

So he spent the afternoon wandering the manor, admiring the collections, until he came to the tower library. Carl was there already with his nose in a rather weighty looking text and Abraham joined him; they read there in companionable silence until well after sunset with the lamps and candles lit, then talked for a while about the gateway and went over their plan, such as it was: storm the castle, eliminate the Dwergi and hack Count Dracula limb from limb. 

Then they spoke to the men. Apparently perhaps thirty more had pledged their support but that remained to be seen and though Abraham quite deliberately omitted the admittedly sketchy details of their plans for the count, he made sure that the men understood their assignment. The men then took to the ale, and amidst the strangely joyous singing, Abraham made his way to the nearest bedroom. In which he found Carl with a village girl, and so he took a room farther – much farther – down the hall instead. 

He could have sworn as he turned to close the door that he saw someone there, at the end of the corridor; she was wearing red, and white satin gloves reached up to her elbows. When he looked again she was gone, but she’d seemed in that fleeting second to be pleading; the look on her face could have meant nothing else. He wondered who she could be, if she’d even been there at all. 

He closed the door and went to bed. He needed his rest for the task that lay ahead.


	22. Chaos in a Kiss

The door opened slowly and Gabriel stared at it with a sort of halting expectation. It wasn’t a feeling that he could explain and he couldn’t say that he cared to; he just sat back restlessly in bed and felt his skin tingle with anticipation. He didn’t have to ask who he’d see there. Soon Dracula was standing in the doorway and he couldn’t tear his eyes away. 

The door swept shut and absently he registered the sound of a key in the lock and of a bar being slipped back into place. Perhaps before that would have meant something to him, had he been planning an escape, and he wondered briefly why he had no plan. Still, that was of no importance, not now, not when Dracula was standing there watching him from his place by the door. 

He was wearing black, as it seemed he always did – high black leather boots over black trousers, a high-necked black shirt under a well-tailored black jacket. He had that silver ring on his finger and his long hair was, as usual, caught up behind his head, just a few errant strands falling across his forehead. The flickering light of the flaming torches – so much more dramatic there than mere lamps – made his dark eyes seem to dance, and spread shadows across his pale face. Then he inclined his head slightly in greeting, his lips quirking in a small smile. Gabriel found himself smiling in return, and that in turn brightened Dracula’s smile. 

“You are no longer frightened,” he said, just a little surprised and obviously rather pleased by this revelation. 

“I never was.”

He nodded, conceding the point. “No, no I do not suppose that you were ever _truly_ frightened. Perhaps I should have said ‘appalled’, ‘disgusted’, ‘overflowing with hatred’, no?” He smirked to himself and began to step forward, so slowly, languidly, that the soles of his boots made no sound at all against the stones of the floor. “But whatever it was that you felt for me before this, you no longer feel it.”

Gabriel found himself shaking his head. “No,” he said, “I don’t.”

“I am glad.”

Dracula was now by the foot of the bed; his hands came to rest on the board there, his long fingers playing at the carved wood. He leant down slightly, his lips just barely parted and his gaze intent though somehow Gabriel knew that its intensity had several more yet hidden levels. “How do you… feel?” he asked, standing back suddenly. “Are you tired? Dear Dorian tells me that you have been feeling rather weak today.”

“I feel fine.” Gabriel frowned as he spoke; the words had come without thinking, and he found with an experimental twitch of his limbs that what he’d said was true. That was strange, when he’d felt so very drained. 

“Then why are you still in bed?” The count tilted his head very slightly. 

That was a very good question. “I don’t know,” he said, still frowning, and cast back the sheets, sat up, twisting to bring his feet to the floor. The stones were cold against his bare feet and the air he knew was warm felt vaguely chilly over his bare torso, but he ignored the sensations as he stood. He was wearing only his trousers and belt but felt oddly comfortable dressed that way, even as he saw and felt Dracula’s gaze running over him. 

“Perhaps you would care for some refreshment?” The count gestured to the table by the covered window, and Gabriel went to it, passing close enough by the count to feel the cloth of his jacket against one bare arm. He took a seat and helped himself to a glass of wine, taking a small sip. He should have been hungry but he found he had absolutely no appetite. Instead of eating he watched as Dracula pulled back the second chair from the table and then sat down. 

“You are not eating?”

“I’m not hungry.”

Dracula smiled, showing a brief flash of white teeth that made Gabriel shiver. “Of course you are not, I should have known. There is nothing on the table that will tempt you. But perhaps…” He folded his hands on his lap and tilted back his head, glancing up at the ceiling for a moment before fixing Gabriel in his gaze once more. “Perhaps there is _something_ for which you have an appetite.”

It was _such_ a line. Ordinarily Gabriel would have laughed, but coming from him it seemed different, darker and vastly more suggestive. It was his voice that made the difference, with its darkness, a strange velvet allure that wove deftly through Gabriel’s mind and held him there, captive. He had somehow regained his strength but still he remained helpless. The very oddest thing about it was that he quite simply did not care. 

“Perhaps,” he said, and Dracula nodded. 

“Yes. But do take a drink.”

So Gabriel lifted the glass again, rested the rim against his teeth for a moment, let the wine brush against his lips, and then drank. He drank, as Dracula moved with that preternatural swiftness and fluidity, tasting the sweetness as he’d never tasted it, feeling Dracula’s palms brush over his bare shoulders. 

“Do you want to drink?” he asked, replacing his glass on the table with one hand as he brushed back his long hair from his neck with the other. He could feel that what he was suggesting was so very, deeply wrong, and understood that somehow he was under Dracula’s control. He should have been infuriated by the knowledge, but he could not quite seem to muster the enthusiasm for that. He was himself but not himself, and could not quite find it in him to hold back. 

Dracula’s fingertips brushed over his neck for a second, but then moved off and skirted along his collarbone. “No, not yet,” he said. “Though it is a most tempting offer, I must tell you.” His hands left Gabriel’s shoulders and he began to move away, this time his heels clicking loudly against the floor. Gabriel turned in his seat to watch him, hooking his arm over the back of the chair. He felt strangely awkward there in Dracula’s presence in a way he’d never really felt before; he watched as he moved, with such ease and grace and effortless dignity, and felt that he was monstrous in comparison. He was too bulky with all his musculature and his height, ungainly in his movements. 

Then he stood, slowly. He couldn’t help himself – he was unable to do anything else. He wiped his hands down over his hips as he stood there, watching the count who now stood perfectly still, his arms by his sides, the line of him perfectly symmetrical. He knew that there was something strange, something not quite natural about the stillness of that body, and knew that it was death he saw in him. He was so unnaturally still that he might as well have been a corpse. Gabriel wondered if that was not exactly what he was. 

Then Dracula spun on his heel and in a flash, a swirl of black cloth and long, dark hair, they were facing each other; Gabriel’s skin crawled as Dracula stepped closer, his right hand reaching for the first small button by his collar. 

“I have something to show you,” said the count, pressing open that first button. Gabriel frowned but found that he could not look away; he wasn’t sure that he wanted to, either, which was most probably what made the task impossible. Dracula continued, pulling open the second button, the third, until his jacket hung open and he pulled it off, tossing it to the floor. Then he tugged apart the ties at the neck of his shirt, revealing the pale flesh underneath along with a twinkle of silver. 

There was a moment, just a moment, where Gabriel could do nothing but stare. They stood there, not six feet from each other in the small, dark room, and Gabriel stared, stricken. “What is that?” he questioned with much more confidence than he actually felt, motioning with one hand to the silver thing that hung there glinting in the torchlight, around the neck of the count. 

“This?” Dracula said, touching his fingers to it briefly with a strange sort of almost-reverence. “It is what I wished to show you. It is yours.”

Gabriel blinked slowly and then stepped forward, reaching up to touch the thing that was hanging on the chain around Dracula’s neck. He lifted it away from his body, his fingertips touching against the cold skin as he did so, and then he looked at it; how he hadn’t noticed before was beyond him then as he saw it was a ring, almost a perfect match for the one he’d worn for so long, that he now knew belonged to Dracula. It was made of solid silver and bore the same emblem, but was just a touch smaller, just a touch less worn. He wondered if Dracula had worn it there against his chest and his unbeating heart for all those years or if it was just another part of the game, designed to trick him into believing in a past that could quite simply not be true. He had no way of knowing. 

Dracula pulled off the chain, slipping it from about his neck and over his dark hair, then undid the clasp and slipped off the ring; he threw the chain down, onto his jacket at the foot of the bed, and held out the ring on the palm of his hand. “Take it,” he said, and so Gabriel did, plucking it from his hand with his fingertips. He slipped it onto his little finger and looked at it, rubbed the pad of his thumb over the raised emblem on it, then looked back up at Dracula. Dracula smiled. 

“You see now, don’t you?” he asked. 

“I don’t know,” he replied, but looking down at the ring that fit so perfectly there on his little finger, he wasn’t sure that he could truthfully say that he didn’t. 

“Then allow me to convince you.” Gabriel suspected that it would not take much to convince him, not that he was entirely sure what he was to be convinced _of_. “There are things that I could do that would perhaps refresh your memory.” And in spite of his better judgement, Gabriel knew that was what he wanted. He didn’t even flinch as Dracula moved closer and slipped one cold hand to the back of his neck. He didn’t move an inch as Dracula brought their foreheads down to rest together. He just closed his eyes, the darkness strangely fitting. 

“We were so close, Gabriel, you and I,” said the count, lowly. “For a while my brides were a comfort to me in your absence, and I dared to believe that I could continue to… live, without you.” He brushed the pad of one thumb over Gabriel’s cheekbone, and he shivered. “Now I have no brides, but here you are. We two should always be close, Gabriel. I thought that I could kill you and be done with it, but I had deceived myself. I…”

“Don’t.”

Dracula frowned, moving back a step to look into Gabriel’s eyes. “Don’t?”

“Don’t say it. Don’t say anything else. Just…”

Then the look on Dracula’s face changed; suddenly Gabriel felt laid bare before him, that Dracula could see right down to his soul, that he knew and understood him completely in that moment. He saw that he was powerless against him, wondered why it had not been so before and then decided that the explanations were wholly unimportant. How could Dracula look at him that way if they had never known each other? Perhaps it was all true – perhaps four hundred years ago he’d killed his best friend, just as Dracula and Abraham had told him. That ring, those rings, with the mark of their order… they told him it was true. That strange nagging prickle of familiarity he felt at Dracula’s touch… that told him it was real. But he didn’t remember. 

The next touch and the kiss that followed it were cold and made him shiver bodily, as though the heat was being leeched from his every cell in one dizzying, hypnotic swirl. He had to bring up his hands to clutch ad Dracula’s shoulders just to keep himself from falling, though that was merely in the physical sense. Inside he felt chaos, curling tendrils of black shadow that plucked at his nerves and vivid dashes of red, clawing him down still deeper. It was all in that kiss, in a fragment of one moment that made his head spin and his soul ache as every moment that had passed before weighed down on him in their vague nonsense forms and cracked him into pieces. But all of that crumbled away, collected like rubble at his feet. Soon all that was left was the kiss. 

And then they moved. They shifted closer to each other, till Gabriel’s cooling body fit against the count whose fingers were tangled in his hair. The kiss deepened and Dracula’s hands dropped to rake his fingernails down over Gabriel’s bare chest. As Gabriel’s eyes closed he moved back, was moved back, and he felt the side of the bed strike at his calves; he sat down, pulling reluctantly from that soul-deep kiss, sustained only by the knowledge or the hope of what was to follow. 

He twisted, hoisting himself up the bed as he watched as Dracula pulled his shirt up over his head and discarded it by the foot of the bed. He worried the bed sheets with his fingernails as he watched Dracula pull off his high boots and stand barefoot on the stone floor. He almost shook as Dracula knelt on the side of the bed and then crawled up to him, over him, like an animal with sharp predator’s eyes. It was a look he knew, from a time and a place that he could not quite recall. It was all so vague but somehow closer than it had ever been as Dracula leant down and took his lips again. It was so close, just there behind his eyes, like a world glimpsed through water that vanishes at a touch. 

Then his tongue touched on Dracula’s long canines and the moment shattered. He forgot. And a strange new intensity flooded into him, just knowing who and what it was above him. 

He yanked the clip from Dracula’s hair and tossed it to the floor where it fell with a clatter; the count’s hair fell forward as he sat back and smiled, showing those sharp teeth. He was kneeling there on the bed between Gabriel’s spread thighs, his hands on his own, his long black hair brushing down over his cheekbones, down onto his shoulders. He was so pale. It was like there was no blood in him at all. 

Then he slid his hands up, over Gabriel’s thighs to the buckle at his waist. With fluid, languid motions he undid it, pulled it from the loops with a deft flick of his wrist and tossed it the way of the hairclip. Gabriel’s breath hitched as Dracula’s hands went to the buttons of his trousers, but even had he trusted himself to speak he wouldn’t have told him no. Instead he batted his hands away and undid the buttons himself, shifted just enough to pull off that last item of his clothing, then moved back into position. 

What happened next was rather a blur, so fast that he couldn’t quite follow, but when Dracula leaned down above him once more they were both naked from head to toe, only the rings on their fingers remaining. Gabriel gasped at the sudden cold of Dracula’s skin against him, at the weight pressing down on him, at the incipient hardness he felt there brushing against his own. They kissed again and his head swam with it, swirling, the agony of his broken life welling up in a kind of brutal, reverent joy somewhere in a hollow behind his eyes, till he could almost have cried out. Then Dracula pulled away and all of that ebbed away, leaving him wondering if he’d even felt it at all, even as he ached to feel it again. 

“I have missed you,” Dracula said, and Gabriel couldn’t doubt it. Dracula’s hands were on him and he felt as if he’d been there before, though that could not have been true. Dracula pushed his legs apart, and the diamond-sharp scratch of nails against the back of the thighs was like something he’d felt a thousand times before. Intangible, formless, silver-bladed memories cut him wide open as Dracula thrust deep inside him. It was not the physical pain that made him cry out loud. 

He clutched desperately at Dracula’s forearms, an icy burn inside him that somehow he knew meant that they’d been bound together from the start. He couldn’t let go. Dracula thrust harder. The pain was nothing; the pain was everything; his muscles clenched and seized and his sight came then only in glimpses, through his half-closed eyes. He saw white skin, black hair, dead eyes that devoured him and left him bloody. He saw fire and felt it through the chill. And as everything he knew, everything he was and might be came raining down in one fabulous ice-sharp mirror-shard downpour, he saw his own blood even before the bite. 

He came, and so did Dracula, as his blood sprang out from the wound in his neck, almost prematurely, as if it welcomed the release. He clutched at Dracula’s shoulders, might even have drawn blood himself, but he had no intention of stopping it. He wanted it. Because in that moment, in Dracula’s embrace in the aftermath of what had gone before, he saw it. He saw it clearly as he’d ever seen. He remembered the day that he’d murdered his best friend. 

Dracula moved, settled down beside him and pulled the blanket up over them both, but Gabriel barely even noticed and didn’t say a word. He knew that he’d forget it just as surely as he knew his name, but in that moment he saw. It was true. He was a murderer after all. Perhaps it was all that he’d ever been. 

They lay together in silence, unmoving, until Dracula’s hand snaked up over Gabriel’s chest, over his collarbone, to the punctures at his throat. He should have shuddered but his body didn’t seem to understand. He should have been repulsed, but he craved the touch. He longed for the chaos of his kiss. 

“I won’t let you leave again, Gabriel,” Dracula told him, his voice right by his ear. 

He didn’t reply, but he knew that he was going nowhere at all. And when they kissed again, amidst the dark and swirling, clawing chaos of their passion, he tasted his own blood on his dead lover’s lips.


	23. Through the Looking Glass

“In the name of God, open this door.”

A strange awed gasp spread across the room amongst the men as the painting of the Transylvanian map became a frozen icy mirror. The gateway to Dracula’s lair lay before them, if only they had the courage to step through. Abraham saw the apprehension on their faces as he turned and looked back at them; forty-seven men by last night’s count were crowded round, sharing an identical look that was tinged with more than a little fear. He didn’t blame them. He felt that way himself, though he knew it didn’t show. His years had given him that happy talent, at least.

Perhaps the men gathered there with their pitchforks, their old swords, scythes, and some with weapons borrowed from the manor with a solemn oath that they would be returned, perhaps they expected that he would say something stirring. As his unnerving, steely gaze swept over them, he saw a hint of expectation creeping into their faces, as though as their leader it was his place to rally them, to speak whatever words of inspiration he had in him that would make them cheer and feel themselves mighty as thousands. It had never been his place to lead before, yet he knew the words all too well. He knew them, yes, but felt no need to speak them. He felt their fear would serve them better than could any call to arms.

“You should speak to them,” said Carl, appearing at his elbow with a sword clutched in his trembling hands. “They’re terrified.”

Abraham smiled. “I know they are,” he said, seeing the villagers’ fear reflected in the friar. “They should be. I don’t know that we will prevail, but I believe that we shall need our fear to stand a chance.”

Carl nodded sagely as though he understood, but Abraham could not say that he understood what he had said himself. He only knew that his path lay beyond that mirror, whether he returned or not. He almost felt it did not matter either way, just so long as their goal was accomplished. He could only hope that the men felt the same.

He adjusted the collar of his coat and swung his brother’s crossbow onto his shoulder. He coughed to clear his throat and nodded solemnly to the sea of expectant faces, and then he spoke. It was not quite the speech for which they’d hoped.

“God be with us,” he said. Then he turned and walked on through the gateway.

It was cold and chilled him straight through his flesh making his teeth chatter and his joints stiffen almost painfully. It was snowing on the other side, with large white flakes falling from the dull, overcast sky above. It could almost have been evening, the sky was so unnaturally dark, with those thick grey clouds gathered around the top of the castle’s highest tower blocking out the sun.

The castle itself was quite unlike any structure Abraham had ever seen if only in its looming, ominous nature. It looked almost to be carved from the living rock, its black walls almost glassy with ice under the dark sky, all sharp edges and spikes. The heads that sat there speared on pikes were vastly more familiar to him, like something from his vast memory of earlier days, but were obviously of no more comfort than the great imposing castle itself.

He heard a rustle of cloth behind him and turned to see Carl stepping through the gate. The friar looked frozen, snow clinging to the ends of his hair, and Abraham realised that he’d actually warmed a little himself, if not much. Carl smiled at him hesitantly as if unsure it was quite appropriate to the situation, then moved over to his side and turned to look at the gate. Judging by the look on Carl’s face they were both wondering the exact same thing: were the villagers actually going to follow? Abraham started to picture just the two of them being the only ones who’d dared pass through in the end, that someone had stuck in a hand and decided it was just a little too cold with just a little too great a danger of death, thank you very much, and they’d all be heading home now, good luck with the vampire-slaying. Ah well, if that was the case then they would just have to step back through and think of something new. At least next time he’d be prepared for the sight of that castle.

As it turned out, he need not have worried – soon a hand appeared and was soon followed by and arm, then the whole body of a Transylvanian villager carrying a rather rusty old scythe and sporting a particularly bewildered expression. More came after, one, two, three at a time, until forty-four men (apparently two had still been passed out drunk and one had been tracked down by his particularly persistent wife) were standing before them.

“Is that everyone?” Abraham asked. A quick headcount ensued; everyone was present and correct with their rusty farm implements. And they headed for the castle gates, almost ominously silent.

They were huge and thick and completely immovable, even with the combined strength of forty-six men against them. Abraham eventually called a halt, rather surprised that they hadn’t been spotted, but then again it must have seemed highly unlikely to those within the castle that anyone would be coming through the gateway. They should know better, surely.

“Well, last time you brother had, hmm, the superhuman strength of a werewolf, so he just picked us up and kind of… jumped inside,” Carl said, which was of course completely and utterly unhelpful.

“Carl, I’m quite sure that no one present is currently in the process of turning into a wolf,” he said, biting back a more sarcastic comment. “We will simply have to go back through the gateway and find something…”

“Errr, Van Helsing?”

Abraham did _not_ like the sound of that. “Yes, Carl?” he asked, sure that he was going to regret having asked.

“Well, it’s the gate.” Abraham glared a little more intensely. “It… well it only opens one way, you see.”

Abraham stared, and Carl smiled sheepishly. Then he strode off between the men back to the gate and lay his hand against it. He didn’t slip through. The gateway was just a sheet of cold, hard glass. He sighed and rested his forehead against it.

“So how did you return last time, Carl?” he asked as Carl scampered up beside him. “Tell me you didn’t have to _walk_ back to the village.”

“I’m not sure that walking is actually possible from here,” Carl said. “But the gateway _does_ seem to open. Just, well, only when Dracula’s dead.”

Abraham turned to face him. “So, we are here, we are stranded here, until Dracula _dies_?”

Carl nodded. “Yes. It would seem that way, yes.”

“And you did not think it was perhaps pertinent that you tell me this, that I should perhaps know this _before_ we arrived here?”

“I thought you knew.”

Abraham sighed. Behind them the men were fast becoming restless, and that did not bode well. Soon, even without his command, they would probably start to hammer at the doors with their weapons – their recycled farm implements – and that was sure to alert Dracula’s Dwergi to their presence. He sighed again and reached into his coat. “You had better cross your fingers and pray that this works, Carl,” he said, removing Gabriel’s twin rotating blades from his inside pockets.

He strode up to the doors, bringing the blades up to full rotation. The sawing of metal against wood was loud and he had no doubt that it would bring the Dwergi running. But if chance and God were on their side, perhaps he would break through before their arrival. After all, it would be a terrible shame to have come so far only to be thwarted by a gate, even a particularly troublesome one.

It wasn’t long before he broke through with one blade, and there was still no sign of the Dwergi. It would take a little more time, but they would get inside. Then the real challenge would begin.


	24. Escape

The numbness that he felt on waking should have meant that something was wrong but instead a strange contentment filled him. He felt happy as he’d ever been, though that happiness was edged in ice and had chilled him into numbness. He shivered in his lover’s arms, and woke him. 

Dracula’s eyes were dark and immediately alert as though he had been merely feigning sleep. Gabriel saw the torchlight in them dancing, but that was all he saw; he wanted to say he saw right down to his soul, that he read his past and his every emotion in those eyes, but he saw nothing of the sort. His eyes were dead. It made him wonder if the man in his arms was even capable of feeling, but something told him that was just a triviality. What mattered was what he felt himself, and surely that was real enough. He was still Gabriel Van Helsing, be there mind control or not, and he was sure of what he felt. He had to trust in something. 

Then Dracula shifted in his arms and the movement, the dance of the fire in his eyes, was like a fragment of forgotten memory. He had forgotten something. He frowned and wondered what it was, why he was thinking of silver shining in his eyes. Inside he was conflicted; he felt he should forget, but a shapeless memory brushed by on the periphery and set his teeth on edge. His happiness was tainted. He wondered if he’d ever know what it was that he’d forgotten. 

“Good morning, Gabriel,” murmured his lover, his breath cold against Gabriel’s throat. “I trust that you slept well?”

In point of fact he’d slept very well, better than he could remember having ever slept. But he was robbed of the chance to respond by a loud knocking on the door. Dracula’s eyes narrowed and he quickly twisted from Gabriel’s embrace; he left the bed. He was naked as he took his first few steps but as Gabriel watched, as he stepped toward the door, his discarded clothes seemed to move like a whirlwind about him. By the time he reached the door he was fully clothed, not a hair straying out of place. It should probably have been astonishing or disconcerting or maybe both together, but Gabriel just watched him mutely.

The door opened. He couldn’t hear the words but he did hear the tone with which the count spoke and he did not seem at all amused at having been disturbed. He gestured to whoever was beyond the door and Gabriel just lay in bed and watched, warming now, wondering absently where Dorian was since he’d become so strangely accustomed to waking in his presence. But then Dracula turned and swept back to the bed in almost impossibly long strides and seated himself on his side of it, crossing his legs at the knee and settling his hands upon them. 

“I am afraid that I have been called away,” he said, glancing back at Gabriel over his shoulder with those empty and yet strangely captivating eyes. Gabriel frowned; he’d noticed that the door was open still, had tested his limbs and found himself to be perfectly capable of moving under his own capacity, but still the fact that Dracula was leaving him meant more than this most apparent chance for escape. His eyes strayed from the door and thoughts of what might lie beyond and returned to Dracula, to the clip that held his hair. It was silver, like his memories.

“I shall not be gone from you for long, I hope,” said Dracula, who then stood and turned and let his eyes linger on Gabriel’s face for longer than was strictly necessary to convey the sentiment. “I will return soon.” And then he swept quickly from the room, the door closing behind him. With only the smallest sliver of his consciousness Gabriel heard a key turn in the lock and the bar lowered back into place. His best and perhaps only chance for escape had passed, but still he dwelled on the empty space in the cold bed beside him. He wished he could think of something else. Anything else. 

The room was so empty then. He glanced around it, over the furniture and the glass of wine that he’d left half empty on the table, over the space on the bed to the drapes pulled across the window. It had to be morning but he was still lying there in the dim light cast from the dying torches. So he threw back the sheets and slipped from the bed, walked barefoot over the cold stone floor and let the morning’s flat grey light in through the high window. He had never seen out from it and found that he didn’t care to at all. He glanced at the food on the table and found he had no appetite. He didn’t even feel the cold until he saw his trousers lying by the bed and realised that he was still naked. He felt lost. He was not himself.

He dressed – if pulling on a pair of trousers and a belt could be considered dressing, combed the tangles from his hair with his fingers and then sat down cross-legged on the bed with a blanket about his shoulders. It felt colder there now that the flat daylight spilled into the room, spreading across the floor like icy water, and he felt ill at ease. He moved, drumming his fingers against his calves at first, then stretching, until finally he left the bed and paced to and fro across the room despite the cold stones beneath his feet. He could barely remember the last time he’d felt so restless. He was irritated by the fact that he couldn’t remember how long he’d been there and dashed his unfinished glass of wine against a wall before he could help himself. Then he sighed and sank back down on the bed, dropping his head into his hands. This was ridiculous. If he didn’t want to leave then how could he be so restless staying?

He knew why, though, even if it was not exactly a fact that he wanted to admit. The tenseness he felt, clawing at his shoulders, the restless feeling that fluttered like moths in his stomach, was due entirely to the fact that Dracula had left the room. He felt he should be with him and would probably feel just this way until he returned. He hated that, or should have, his happiness being so dependent on another, and on Dracula in particular who he knew to be his enemy, who he’d returned there to kill. But all he could focus on with any clarity was the moment that he’d return, about the sight of him stepping through the door. He could see him so clearly in his mind, and exactly what he’d do… Dracula was not the only one who could move swiftly and before the count knew it he’d be pressed up against the wall, hands pinned above his head, Gabriel’s teeth at his throat. They would kiss until Gabriel felt light-headed, his hands tracing the muscles that lay beneath that stark black jacket until they could stand it no longer and simply had to…

The Door opened, quickly, and brought him back to himself. He glared, narrowing his eyes, cursing under his breath as Dorian stepped into the room. 

“You just ruined a perfectly good fantasy,” he said, and Dorian frowned, looking at him rather strangely. 

“Well, I’m sorry Gabriel, but it _is_ rather important,” he told him, leaving the door open behind him and walking quickly across the room. He looked so graceful doing it but Gabriel couldn’t help but note that Dracula was more graceful still. Considering that they both seemed to have made pacts with the devil, Gabriel found that rather odd. 

“Why are you here, Dorian?” he asked, as Dorian unceremoniously tipped whatever it was that he’d been carrying down onto the bed. He looked down at it and realised it was his clothes, the rest of them: sitting there at the foot of the bed were his shirt and jumper, socks, boots, coat… even his scarf had apparently survived. He plucked at the sleeve of his battered leather coat and wondered if Dorian had kept them for him all along. Not that that mattered precisely, of course. 

“Well, I thought you might rather like to escape,” Dorian said. That was certainly unexpected. “Your brother and your friar friend are downstairs with fifty or so rather raggedy villagers and though it does seem that their attempts to end Dracula’s unlife may prove to be rather abortive… let’s just say that this could well be your last best chance of leaving here. Alive, that is.”

Gabriel stopped glaring, stopped frowning and just stared at Dorian. It was then that it finally struck him, swiftly and bluntly. He didn’t think that he’d be leaving there alive. 

“Oh,” Dorian said, and took a step back. He must have seen it written there on his face or in his eyes because it was patently obvious that Dorian understood completely. “Oh, I see.”

Gabriel said absolutely nothing, but perhaps his expression changed. He wanted to believe that it did, because even though he knew he didn’t care about leaving, Dorian had tried to do something for him. If Dracula found out then he’d probably burn Dorian’s picture because of it, and that would most likely mean the very end of Dorian Gray. He wanted to think that his look was grateful but determined. It was probably closer to mocking. Maybe he ought to tell Dracula what Dorian had suggested, once he came back. 

“So he finally broke you,” Dorian said, not only a little disdainfully. It was an odd tone and an odd look for him, he whose natural expression was that of innocence and wonder at the world, but he did it so very _well_. Of course, Dorian was very far from innocence, Gabriel knew; he was at best a liar, with every other human sin beneath it. But even his disdain was beautiful. 

“He didn’t break me,” Gabriel replied. “He opened my eyes.” But his conviction was seriously and almost palpably lacking. It was so strange. “I think that you should leave.”

Dorian nodded slowly, still giving him that look, still making Gabriel’s chest tighten. “Yes,” he said. “I think I should. I’m quite sure that I’m not needed here. Please don’t expect that I will linger here waiting for you to realise your mistake, Gabriel; you did always know that I have a greater interest in self-preservation than in playing the hero, even where you’re concerned.”

Gabriel had quite simply no idea what he was supposed to say to this and so he remained silent. All he could do was to hold onto his coat and watch mutely was Dorian adjusted his collar, gave him one last wry smile and then swept from the room. 

The whole experience, he found as he sat there running his fingertips over the seams of his coat, had left him with no particular lasting impression. He knew that he should have felt _something_ , just as he knew he should have accepted Dorian’s offer and bolted through that still open doorway, but he was oddly and near completely detached. He couldn’t even muster a feeling when he thought of Carl and Abraham and wondered if they were still living. That couldn’t be right, surely; his old friend and a man who claimed to be his brother had quite foolishly stormed the castle and he found that he quite simply could not have cared less. But he didn’t have time to dwell on that thought, or didn’t feel that he wanted to give time to it. He had vastly more important things on his mind. 

How long would it take for Dracula and the Dwergi to dispatch their would-be killers? Not so very long, he thought, considering the state of the villagers, and Carl – though not exactly short on the inventive side of things – was still no field man. The only unknown, he thought, was Abraham; he knew so very little about the man, but had a rather odd feeling that he could cause Dracula some trouble if he put his mind to it. He tried to reason with himself that Abraham was just one man, but that was where his logic failed him as he knew that not so long ago he himself had been considered just one man. Abraham Van Helsing was the unknown of the equation, and he found that unsettling. He needed to know that Dracula would be returning. 

He let go of the sleeve of his coat and pulled a sock from the pile of clothing. Two or three of the torches had died out and he was feeling colder, so he started to dress; it was as he lifted his hair free of the neck of his jumper that he looked up at the door, really _looked_ at it and recognised that Dorian had left it open. No one had closed it and locked it behind them. The bar was out of place. All he had to do was cross the room and pass through it, and he’d slip away in the confusion. But he couldn’t leave. Obviously he couldn’t leave because without the gateway being open or the ability to sprout wings at will, escape was actually impossible, but also because he had to wait there. He had a plan that involved the far wall, teeth, and rather more nudity than was generally deemed acceptable in polite society.

He could hear something, he thought, something that echoed down the corridors and through the halls. He knew it must be the villagers, Carl and Abraham somewhere amongst them, and the thought of the battle raging so close to him while he sat there immobile was truly rather disconcerting. He shouldn’t go but he knew he should be there, with them. He could almost feel the crossbow in his hands. For that matter he could almost feel the wolf in his veins, an echo of what had gone before, and when he closed his eyes he could still see Anna. She was dead and gone and that was still upon him, and knowing that distracted him for a moment. But only for a moment, and then he realised that there was somewhere that he had to be. 

He left the bed and pulled on his coat. Yes, there was somewhere that he had to be.


	25. The Dwergi

The sound of the rotating blades against the wood of the castle gates was horrendous and Carl covered his ears with the palms of his hands to shut it out. He was vaguely aware that several of the villagers were talking about him, probably saying that he should have stayed behind and wondering what use a friar who could only just tell the right end of a sword was going to be to them. He couldn’t say that their chatter bothered him, however; in fact, it rather buoyed up his spirits because he knew that he had, in his own not insignificant way, already once helped to defeat Dracula. Who else was there that could say that, exactly? Not even Abraham. 

He liked Abraham. Carl was accustomed to condescension but mostly, when he was in the correct humour, Abraham actually treated him as an intellectual equal. There were, in fact, only two types of people that Carl really respected: those who lived good lives and remained strong in the face of adversity, and those he could consider his equals in intelligence. Gabriel he supposed fit into that first category in a very literal sense, fighting against the enemies of the Church, which in Carl’s opinion was the very epitome of good, and Abraham was of the second. He respected Carl’s knowledge and despite the odd, dismissive moments when he reminded him terribly of his brother, they did seem equal. Even if he had acknowledged as soon as they’d met that should it come to it, Abraham would lead. After all, he had the plan, and despite his age there was no doubting that he has the physicality. 

Still, for all that he knew of Abraham, Carl had not seen him as a man of action until that moment. Until he had produced Gabriel’s blades from his coat and marched up to the castle gates with that determined look in his eyes, Carl had simply chosen to see him as the doctor rather than _this_. Watching as he sawed his way through the thick wooden gate, it was easy to see that he truly was Gabriel’s brother. 

Then the noise ceased and Carl’s hands left his ears just in time to catch the loud clunk of the chunk of wood that Abraham had cut out hitting the stone paving inside. Abraham slipped inside and soon the villagers poured in after him in a human wake, Carl swept along with them quite against his will. They were inside. Carl found himself wishing that he’d stayed behind after all. 

They moved forward into the hall and Carl drew out the sword he was carrying from where he’d tucked it not terribly securely into his belt. It was a sword from Valerious Manor, one that he’d seen Anna use and he hoped that would bring him luck. Of course he didn’t believe in luck, just the will of God, and as they walked down the hall he had to wonder if God was really with them. It was such an imposing place, all dark columns and statues with great fires for light that didn’t even nearly ward off the cold, and in the end he wasn’t sure if it was the temperature or the ominous nature of the hallway that was making him shiver. Perhaps, he thought, it was both. 

He tried to make his way forward and up to Abraham who led them but their pace was a little too swift and most of the men seemed rather disinclined to move out of his way. So he hung back, almost right at the back of their depressingly small group, and looked around as they walked. His gaze flittered nervously and with a growing kind of dismay over the faces of those around him; some were seemingly strong, healthy men, but some were younger, much too young. They should not have been there; some looked to be only in their teens, clutching at their forks or scythes or rusting old swords, and Carl wondered what on earth they were doing there. They were even more out of place in that mob than he was, and he knew that he was most certainly out of place. Perhaps their fathers had brought them, or sent them. He felt with a discouraging sort of certainty that not all of them would return alive. 

They walked in silence, which was in itself terribly disquieting and uncomfortable, but as they moved down the hall Carl could almost feel that they were being watched. It was a worrying feeling, looking round and seeing no one but almost _knowing_ that someone was there. He wished that he could tell someone but none of the men would have listened and even had he been able to reach Abraham he would either know already or give him that incomparable Van Helsing look that told him to stop being so silly and to pull himself together. So he did just that; he straightened his cloak and grasped his sword and tried to pretend that he didn’t feel and thousand eyes were on them in the dark. 

It was almost a relief when they reached the far side of the hall and the hidden Dwergi attacked. They came as if from nowhere, proving that Carl had been completely justified in his fears and at the same time terrifying him still further. They were pinned back against the far wall; the Dwergi had sound strategy, letting them cross the wide, open hall before swarming in against them, and then Carl, who was somehow at the centre of the mob now, saw more of the strange little creatures crowding down the stairs to either side. They had no choice but to fight. 

The men were doing well he noted absently, considering they were none of them trained soldiers; they hacked at the Dwergi with their improvised weapons, spraying the stone slabs of the floor with dark blood. Carl could barely watch. Of course he wasn’t meant to be watching – a fact brought to him quite swiftly as the men spread out and he turned to see a Dwerger running at him. He held out his sword and quite by accident the Dwerger simply impaled itself upon it, making a horrid little squeaking sound and falling to the ground. Carl stared at it for a moment in complete horror, but knew he hadn’t the time to spare. He braced one foot against the body and pulled out the sword, which was covered now in vivid smears of blood. His face crinkled in disgust. Then another Dwerger came at him. 

It was horrible, quite simply, not that Carl had time to think after that first kill. He hadn’t a clue what he was doing but he swung his sword anyway, surprised every time a stroke hit and his own bloody death was averted again and again. His heart was pounding and he could see that the hall was now swarming with chittering Dwergi, hundreds of them, though the men were chopping them down like wheat in harvest. Which was, Carl though in a moment of clarity between two attacks, a strangely appropriate simile, considering the nature of the villagers’ weapons. 

The air was soon almost wet with blood and Carl had to resist the urge to run or to try to help the village men he saw who had been injured. He saw one of the boys, who could not have been more than seventeen years old, clutching desperately at a wound in his thigh that had almost certainly severed the femoral artery. They boy was crying vainly, pressing his hands to his bloody leg, and Carl knew that he didn’t have long. Strangely, that spurred him on, in spite of the leaden ache in his muscles. 

Then a cry went up amongst the Dwergi. Just as Carl pulled his sword from a now-dead body he heard it, like a horn, and then the Dwergi fled. The men caught a few as they ran but mercifully didn’t follow as the strange but deadly little creatures had scattered in all directions. Carl knew that they should not be divided. He looked at the bodies, the dying and the dead, and felt his heart sink. He had hoped that none of this would be necessary and in his apparent naivety had almost believed that it could be avoided. How foolish he’d been. 

He knelt in the blood on the stones by the side of the dying boy. He held his bloody hand when he held it out to him, and listened to the garbled, incomprehensible Romanian he heard as though he understood. He heard the boy’s last breath as the other stood around, and then he reached out and closed his eyes. His body was still warm. He bowed his head. “Requiescat in pace,” he said, and stood. 

The villagers’ eyes were on him, not a single face turned from him. Perhaps thirty were left from forty-four, and at least five could not be moved. At first he didn’t know what he should say, but then he realised, with a strange combination of terror and pride, that they were all looking to him for instruction. 

Where was Abraham? He scanned the faces of the bodies, the faces of those left living, and could not find him. He wasn’t dead but he wasn’t there, so where _was_ he? He had no idea. But most importantly, he realised that no matter his curiosity, that didn’t really mean a thing. The plan had not changed, and they had to go on. The villagers had elected him their leader in Abraham’s absence, which was a mystery to him. Then he looked down at the peaceful face of the dead boy and realised why. Ah, the power of faith. 

He took a breath and picked up his sword. “This way!” he said, and the twenty-five villagers left for the stairs. 

They found the bulk of the remaining Dwergi forces in the tower basement and amidst the old equipment that had once belonged to Frankenstein, under the concourses and dull sky that peeked through the open spaces, the massacre began. They didn’t stop for a second until each and every last Dwerger was dead and cast to the floor, their blood staining the villagers’ weapons and clothes right down to their skin. Carl was no exception and felt so very full of remorse as he watched the villagers set light to the bodies there in the icy room. He knew that the creatures had been sent to kill them, that every last one of them had served Dracula, but knowing that it had been a simple case of _us or them_ did not change the fact that they were dead. And Carl had led the men to do it. 

He had no more time for remorse; he would say whatever prayers he could and face whatever punishment awaited, but that was for another time, if they should escape. There were still Dwergi in the castle, and Dracula was yet to be defeated. He still had a job to do and though he was still unsure, still thought himself just a friar if of the rather exceptional kind, he would do his best to fulfill their goal in Abraham’s absence. 

They left the tower and began to search through the castle, burning as they went. A great roar of flames and smoke carried behind them, and Carl felt somewhat warmed then by the villagers’ tenuous good cheer. But he would have felt safer beside Gabriel, or Abraham. He could only pray that they were safe as he went about their business.


	26. The Burning

There were parts of the castle that were far from quiet, filled with the moans of the injured and the roaring of flames, but as Abraham strode away the corridors around him emptied into silence. The only sounds in that heavy, expectant air were of his boots on the stones and his determined breath – breath that clouded in the dark like the ominous Transylvanian mists. 

The corridors narrowed as they wound their way about their castle like some great stone serpent until it would have been a tight fit for two men to walk there side by side. Of course, Abraham was quite alone and had no trouble in that direction, but the thought brought it to him keenly that he had always planned to walk those corridors with his brother. Gabriel was absent and without him he could not have felt much more alone, or more vulnerable. There was no one to stand at his back. He might die at any given moment, his task unfulfilled. 

He hadn’t a clue where he was going, though you wouldn’t have guessed it from his long, confident strides and the strong, determined set of his face. Every now and then he paused to throw open a door and peer inside as though he half expected to come across the very heart of the vampire’s lair, Dracula himself lying in a coffin just waiting for the kiss of steel against his neck. What he found, in fact, was room after room of paintings or clothes or books or old weapons, four hundred years’ worth of collected clutter. There was no sign of the count. His long, fast strides were more from frustration than from any kind of navigational awareness. 

He wished that he had Carl with him; not that Carl’s presence was at all comforting – he had to admit that he was becoming perplexingly fond of the odd little friar though he was as well with him as without him - but at that precise moment it might have been useful to have someone about him who had been inside the castle previously and who might conceivably have been able to point him in something resembling the right direction, not into a room full of Louis Quatorze furniture or moth-eaten ball gowns from early 18th century Vienna. He wanted to be face to face with Dracula, not a stuffed partridge and a slightly mildewed badger. 

Of course, it was entirely his own fault that he was there alone; once the fight had been well underway he had slipped away – if you can call hacking your way through perhaps fifteen Dwergi ‘slipping’ – down a staircase and left Carl and all the villagers behind. He had to admit that he did feel just the slightest prickle of guilt over his desertion, though it had actually been a part of the plan all along, albeit a rather hidden, undiscussed part of it. It was better this way, much more efficient, provided Carl stayed alive long enough to lead what was left of the villagers and which was slightly more suspect, the villagers actually listened to him. Abraham himself was the only one who actually need face Dracula; the fewer the people with him the better, he had decided. At least that way some of them might live to tell the tale. 

There was a smell of smoke in the air and Abraham guessed that the villagers were burning the castle. The none-too-subtle undercurrent of burning flesh told him that the castle was not the only thing on fire; perhaps even if he did not succeed – which he felt was not at all unlikely – a blow would have been struck. He found that he was smiling to himself in spite of his frustration and he jogged down the small spiral staircase at the end of the corridor. All he found was a rather extensive, dusty and completely uninteresting wine cellar, and so he jogged back up the stairs. This time he climbed to the next level. 

The smile dropped from his face. Even in the relative dark of the shadowed hall he could see what was before him. He stopped dead. 

The hall was long and wide and lit by the grey sky through high, narrow windows that competed with the torches that flamed along the walls in the hands of great stone gargoyles. The mix of light gave the room an odd ethereal glow that stung at Abraham’s eyes but he didn’t move to rub at them. He stared down the hall, at the figure in black standing by the tall double doors at the far end, on the stones at the edge of the hall’s great rotting carpet. 

“Ah, Abraham,” said the count. “How kind of you it is to join me. I have been waiting.”

Abraham bowed his head in acknowledgement and then stepped forward. His steps seemed somewhat hesitant, echoing loudly as they did from the blank stone walls, but as he reached the edge of the huge carpet he grew steadier, more determined. Perhaps the room had once housed a great banquet table, had seen guests with joyful, smiling faces, and there was Dracula greeting him playing the host, greeting him as an old friend. They had never been friends. Never. 

He was perhaps a third of the way, two fifths, across the room when his hands went to the blades inside his coat. Dracula’s stance changed at that very instant and he wagged one finger, the forefinger of the hand that bore his ring. 

“Stop,” he said, and Abraham stopped. “You have been a bad guest, Abraham, bringing your toys into my house. Perhaps I could excuse your uninvited friends, but this?”

“I do not recall receiving an invitation myself, Vladislaus. I came to kill you, not to eat cake.” Dracula smiled broadly and with absolutely no feeling. Abraham brought the blades from his pockets. 

“I did not offer cake,” said the count. “I am afraid that you will find no food here at all, unless you would care to suck on an icicle or perhaps nibble on a slice of roast Dwergi.”

“I think that I’ll enjoy killing you.”

“I think that I will enjoy watching you try.”

He didn’t run. Perhaps he could have and perhaps, _perhaps_ he would have been quite surprisingly fast and especially for a man of his apparent age, but he didn’t run – he walked. He strode forward purposefully, past the stone torch-bearing gargoyles and the open doorways that led away from the hall, past another staircase, a rotting shambles of a chair. He pumped at the blades in his hands, feeling the rotation through his palms and up through his arms. He was ready. Dracula hadn’t moved. All he had to do was strike at the right point, catch him off guard If that was at all possible given that he was standing there watching his approach… a couple of well-placed slices and then a fire and that would be the end. Of course presuming that…

There was a sudden burst of motion ahead of him, in two points at the exact same instant; Dracula changed, his wings sweeping back, his body growing and warping until what stood there was as much bat as man, but that was not what stopped Abraham’s determined march. The second movement was the opening of a door, and through it stepped Gabriel Van Helsing. 

“Gabriel!” he cried, stopping, the blades slowing in his hands. But it was as if his brother simply hadn’t heard him, hadn’t seen him, or didn’t care if he had. Instead, as Abraham looked on, he walked up to Dracula. For a moment Abraham almost dared to hope that Gabriel held a sword beneath his long leather coat, that he would follow their plan and strike out at the monster before him. But he knew better beneath that vain thread of hope. He was barely even surprised to see him there, and though disappointed he was not at all shocked when Gabriel stepped forward and Dracula gathered him into his arms. In fact, he expected it. 

Then they turned. As Abraham watched they turned to him, Gabriel’s eyes dark and empty as Dracula’s behind him, Dracula’s hands settling on his shoulders. The height of the thing that Dracula had become made Gabriel seem so small… and then, as the smell of smoke drifted in the air, Dracula’s vast wings came around Gabriel, saying as clearly as any words in any language, _you have failed_.

That was the moment that Abraham gave up hope. In that moment he knew that all was lost. None of them would leave that place. 

The smell of smoke was getting thicker, tickling at Abraham’s throat even as he succumbed to his despair. It seemed that the whole castle would be fired from the lowest cellar to the heights of the tallest tower if the villagers had their way, and he couldn’t say that he blamed them. Generations of their families back over four hundred years had suffered at Dracula’s hands; there was not one of those men who had not experienced loss, and now they were about their revenge as though the walls and halls of his home were the flesh of his body. Oh, if only it were that simple, if destroying what there was of him in that castle would undo the count himself as if his soul were in it and not just leave him temporarily homeless. How he wished that could be the case, but it was not. All that the burning would do was to anger him. Then Dracula would visit his vengeance on further generations, once those men were dead. 

“You cannot win,” said the count, in a voice not of this earth, something like a hiss and a growl from behind those sharp white teeth that made Abraham’s skin crawl. He agreed; he couldn’t win. He had been foolish to try. There was no hope. His usually, characteristically optimistic air had deserted him and left him cold; he wondered if that was Dracula’s influence and decided that under the circumstances it was unimportant if Dracula affected him or not as the situation would remain hopeless with his optimism or without. He dropped the blades to the floor where they struck with a dull thud and bit at the rotting fabric. He didn’t need them anymore. Dracula seemed to smile. 

There was a racket in the corridor behind him, coming closer and bringing the acrid smell of burning with it. He wanted to turn and shout, tell them to leave or they would surely die, but he didn’t move at all. The men were coming closer, down the countless winding corridors, their weapons clanging against the stone walls. Soon they would find the stairs – they would find either the wine cellar or that hall and he thought at least if they found the wine they could go out jolly and insensate. He needed to tell them to run, he didn’t want their deaths on his conscience, but as he started to turn a quick flash of colour caught his eye. He stopped. 

He searched the far end of the room but saw only his enthralled brother and Count Dracula. The count’s long teeth grazed at Gabriel’s already wounded neck and as if on reflex Abraham pressed his fingers to his own neck, trying not to imagine how it would be to feel the press of teeth to his skin before his blood sprang out in a line of puncture wounds. He could almost feel it. Then he saw movement again. The men were still coming closer. 

Stopped as he was part way through a turn, Abraham was the only one in that hall who really saw what happened next. The roaring, clanging villagers came ever closer down the corridors and Abraham had missed his chance to tell them to turn back. They sounded like an army rather than twenty-three men and a friar, but even that could not raise Abraham’s spirits – that was how he knew that Dracula truly was affecting him. Then the men burst into the room with a clash of swords and scythes and forks and an almost drunken racket of incomprehensible voices. He saw them come in, then he turned. 

For a moment Dracula was distracted, and a moment was all that it took. In a flash of steel grey mingled with the low torchlight a figure appeared from the shadows; it was only a second before a long blade was driven in down through Gabriel’s shoulder and into Dracula’s heart. 

The scream was like nothing that Abraham had ever heard before, silencing the villagers and echoing down every corridor in the icy, burning castle. Dracula batted his attacker away across the room as though he weighed no more than a doll, but already it was too late. While the villagers looked on silently, while Dracula screamed and Gabriel bled, impaled on the blade, pinned to his lover, Abraham sprang forward. This time he ran, and he was quick – few men on earth could have matched him. Before Dracula had the time or the sense to act, Abraham pulled out the sword. As his form became human, it was then that Abraham lopped off his head. 

***

Gabriel was on the floor. At first he had no memory of how he’d come to be there, of where he was, of whose head that was lying by his thigh, but then in the blink of an eye he knew. And knowing angered him. 

There was a blade in Abraham’s hands, slightly bloody, and he snatched it away as he pulled himself to his feet. One of the villagers was almost seven feet tall but at that moment even he must have felt small, as Gabriel Van Helsing roared. He was the biggest man in the room then, immense, anger blazing in his eyes as that guttural, visceral cry bubbled out of him. When the blade struck Dracula’s body, it cut him in half. Gabriel was left sobbing on his knees. 

He could not understand how he could have let himself be used in such a way. He’d known it all along, since he’d woken in that bed that first morning, and he’d done nothing at all to counter it. He hadn’t cared. He’d even wanted it, wanted the touch of those cold hands, cold lips, sharp teeth… he had _offered_ himself, and God, Dracula had taken everything he’d had to give. All he had left was anger and shame. 

Then a hand came to rest on his shoulder, and red-eyed and shame-faced he looked up. It was Abraham he saw, who was perhaps his brother. 

“He is not really dead, you know,” he said, in that accent which was so unlike his own and yet so familiar. Gabriel frowned and looked back at the body; he shuddered as he saw it, lying there in three bloody parts, twitching as though ready to sit up. The dark eyes suddenly flickered open and fixed him in their gaze. The mouth of that disembodied head began to open also, and for one horrible second Gabriel thought it meant to speak. But before a sound could emerge the blade was out of Gabriel’s hands and was whipped straight down the centre of that head, cleaving the mouth in two. 

“I have heard him speak enough,” Abraham said, bending to wipe the blood from the blade onto Dracula’s jacket. “I did always say he was too much in love with the sound of his own voice. Strange how some things never will change.”

Gabriel smiled a very small smile in spite of himself, as Abraham walked away. 

The whole situation struck him as surreal somehow, despite the fact that he’d so often witnessed death before and many times been the cause of it. He knelt there on the edge of the tattered carpet as Abraham enlisted the help of the villagers and hacked the body into smaller pieces. He watched as six separate fires were built right there, once they’d pulled back the ruined carpet, and they burned the count’s body there in that hall. It wasn’t until the fires were raging that he noticed movement off to the side of the hall, in the shadows under the high windows. He turned and looked, and someone looked dazedly back at him. He knew exactly who it was. 

Abraham and Carl both gave him the exact same look as he climbed to his feet, drained now that it was over; it was a look that he’d classify as concerned with just a touch of _are you mad? Don’t go over there, he’ll probably kill you!_ He nodded and waved them off and though they acknowledged it and went back to tending their fires and chunks of burning vampire corpse, he could almost certainly feel their gazes on his back as the walked across the room. It took rather more effort than he would have liked just to keep himself from staggering like a moth-eaten mummy. 

“I thought you were leaving,” he said as he slid down the wall, leaving a bloody smear as he went, coming to rest beside Dorian Gray. He rested his head back and let it roll until he was looking him in the eye. 

“I changed my mind,” Dorian said, shrugging. Apparently being batted against the wall had knocked him out cold, regardless of his invulnerability, and he was just now creeping back to consciousness. And it was odd, but in the dark it almost looked like there were wrinkles around his big brown eyes. “I thought that I should stay and… see how it turned out.”

Gabriel sighed and nodded mutely, pressing his scarf to his shoulder which was bleeding rather less than he though it properly should. “Did you have to stab me?”

“It seemed like a good idea at the time.” Dorian’s head dropped forward into his hands. His hair, usually a deep, vibrant brown, seemed almost ashen. His hands were lined and pale. 

“Dorian, what’s happening to you?”

When he looked up, his face was as lined as his hands, wrinkles scoring his once perfect cheeks and forehead like trenches. His hair was greying before Gabriel’s eyes. “My portrait’s burning,” he said, and his voice was changed, too. “I suppose that I’m dying.” 

He wanted to say something, to tell him that it wasn’t, couldn’t be true, but it was right there before his eyes. Dorian’s glorious youth was gone, ravaged, eaten away by the weight of the long life he’d led, a catalogue of every vice, a record that damned him and made of him something almost unbearable to see. He watched, wrenched inside, as years of opium abuse hollowed out his cheeks, made him gaunt and skeletal. He watched as the deceit, the intrigues, made his eyes sly and robbed him entirely of his all-pervading innocence. He watched fraud twist him and murder make him wretched. He watched as all he’d thought that Dorian Gray had been died away. He couldn’t say a word. Somehow, though it was a horror to witness, he knew it was fitting. It was exactly what Dorian deserved. He knew it, but he somehow didn’t exactly believe it. 

The smell of smoke filled the room and Gabriel imagined Dorian’s portrait in those flames. He saw the paints blister and crack, consumed by fire until all that remained was the ash of Dorian’s youth. He looked at him as he sat there beside him, motionless now and propped against the wall, and couldn’t think of a single word to say. There should have been something, anything, to mark the moment, but even his customary ‘requiescat in pace’ seemed bizarrely inappropriate. So in the end he just settled for _thank you_.

“Don’t thank me.” Dorian’s lips moved and the voice he heard was thin, almost not Dorian at all. His stomach clenched. It was like the dead talking. “This was the very least that I owed you.”

“You’re not dead?”

Dorian blinked with his paper-thin eyelids and raised one thin grey eyebrow. “No, I’m not dead,” he said. “It’s as much a mystery to me as to you, believe me.”

Except coming from that body, so thoroughly stained with sin, it was hard to believe a word. It was agony just to look at him, so much worse in the flesh than in the painting. But Gabriel nodded anyway. It was a strange gift to know the truth from a creature like Dorian, so riddled with wrongs and faults and excesses that he seemed barely even human. They had both believed that he would die. Perhaps death would have been more merciful. 

He looked away but just as Dorian began to say he understood, that no one should have to see him as he truly was, Gabriel moved closer until their shoulders touched. Dorian grew quiet as if his eloquence had just then run out, and Gabriel sat there beside him, feeling the pulsing wrongness of him strangely comforting when compared to the aching emptiness that had always been in him before. After all, in his line of work he met worse evils than Dorian Gray, a man who had made the wrong pact and lived the wrong life, sinister though that life had always been. 

They sat silently, watching the fires that reduced the count’s body to ashes and brought warmth to that icy place. They watched as Abraham sent the villagers for boxes, and watched as he filled six of them with ashes. So it was done. It was over. They had done what they had set out to do. Knowing that steeled him, but left his emotions untouched. 

“Gabriel, we are leaving.” Abraham had everything prepared, from the boxes to the villagers to the injured and the dead; he gave Gabriel a nod and the villagers began to filter slowly toward the door, Abraham and Carl with them. It was time to leave. He wasn’t quite convinced if what he felt was reluctance to leave or not, but then Abraham looked back at him and he nodded. Losing his train of thought. 

Gabriel looked at Dorian; he was about to ask the question when Dorian shook his head. Then he asked it anyway. 

“Come with us,” he said. 

Dorian shook his aged head again, slowly, his long, lank grey hair grazing at the shoulders of the suit that was still immaculate. Gabriel knew what his answer would be before he spoke, but still he hoped that he’d be wrong. He wasn’t. 

“I can’t,” Dorian said. “How could I leave when I look like this? I thought that I’d die and I wish I had rather than this. I can’t leave. You know I can’t.”

“Yes,” Gabriel said. “I know.”

Then he stood and turned his back. He could feel the weight of the gaze of the thing behind him, the thing that was Dorian Gray, but he didn’t turn back to him. He didn’t say goodbye. He walked away instead. 

Abraham was waiting by the door, and they left the room together. They were the last to leave, Carl at the head of the party leading the way out. They passed sad and ransacked rooms, the bodies of Dwergi not subjected to the fire, torches that had burned down and spluttered out. They walked down narrow, winding corridors and through halls, stepped down staircases and finally came to the great gates and their man-sized hole. Gabriel could guess what had done that, and the thought brought a small, vague smile to his face that his brother obviously interpreted as meaning that he would survive. He didn’t correct him. He realised there was nothing to correct; it would be a while yet before he could forget it, but he was living. He was alive. 

They followed the villagers to the gateway, watched as man by man they stepped back through and into the relative warmth and comfort of Valerious Manor. There would be mourning on the other side but also cause for celebration, now that Dracula was no longer a threat. He could imagine the parties, the smiles, the perfect excuse for excessive consumption of alcohol… he’d leave before that really began. He felt like a little self-pity and wallowing, then perhaps he might celebrate at a more appropriate juncture. 

Abraham stepped through and Gabriel was left alone in the bitter, icy wind. For a moment he hoped to see Dorian, hideous though he was, though he could not explain that hope. He turned, but Dorian wasn’t there. He should have known. For a person like Dorian, living in that body would be worse than death. He could never leave, and Gabriel had to. 

But just for a second as he stepped up to the gate, he thought he saw something. It wasn’t Dorian; he turned already half way through, and saw her as the cold of the mirror bit at him. 

Anna’s pleading eyes looked thankful as she faded, and Gabriel felt a warm hand pull at him from the other side. 

“Requiescat in pace,” he said, and she nodded before she was gone. And then he walked away. The small smile that she’d given him meant that it was over.


	27. The End

They didn’t meet again till Rome. Carl, he found, had been there three weeks or more already, Abraham for almost two; Gabriel himself had arrived just three days before their meeting but had stayed outside of the city, in a room in a small inn. He didn’t try to make believe that the Church didn’t know he was there, that he hadn’t noticed eyes on him all the way across Europe, but if he kept his attention focused elsewhere then it was easy enough to keep up a façade of independence, as though he didn’t belong to the Vatican. 

They met in that same small café on the Piazza di Spagna, at the allotted time on the scheduled date. It was a Monday; the sun was setting outside and the air even inside the small building was chilly, despite the constant flow of steaming black coffee in their delicate little cups. Gabriel didn’t take off his coat. Carl didn’t take off his cloak. Though they remained at their table for over an hour, they looked as though about to leave at any moment. 

The three of them stayed until they were the only customers remaining, the two Van Helsings retaining a near impenetrable silence as Carl spoke enough for them all. Gabriel barely heard a word he said, however; he was somewhere else entirely, and Carl’s words meant less to him than nothing at all. 

Three months had passed by then since they had ridden together to Varna. They’d spent the night in the same small inn, the owner’s daughter giving Carl a knowing wink as they entered, and then they parted in the morning. Gabriel had stood by the dock and tried vainly not to notice as both Carl and Abraham boarded a ship bound for Istanbul, though he read nothing into it. Not one of the three was supposed to know where the others were going, and really a voyage by ship to Istanbul could mean Mongolia just as easily as Turkey. He didn’t want to know where they were going. He didn’t speculate. 

Gabriel himself stayed clear of water altogether and rode back through the mountains. He preferred it that way, leaving the seas for those with the stomach for it as he rode back hard through the Carpathians. He rode north to Galatz then turned to the west, passed over the mountains and took the winding roads to the border with Hungary. Budapest came up quickly, just over a week, where he stopped though for not more than a few days. He moved on, into Austria, Graz then north to Vienna. He stopped counting the days when villagers stopped him, suspicious but desperate for help. He tried to reason with himself and simply move on but always he was held back. The days merged together with the threats to his life. He stopped counting. 

He saw off the first box in Prague. He knew the place and the language and perhaps once he would have questioned how or why. Not in those days, however; he came to the city and in that place, after days in which he fulfilled an agreement made almost the moment he’d set foot there, he disposed of the ashes. He saw to the Golem and then, still aching, bruised, he tipped over the box, upended it from the Charles Bridge into the Vlatava. Just one more, and then it would all be done. 

Leaving Prague, he was at a loss. He’d had no plan that he could discern even up until that point, simply riding wherever the fancy or the roadways took him, but now he seemed lost. It was important he find the right place, he thought, important he didn’t choose just any place along the path, and that rattled him, put him off. He rode north, up into Germany, came to Dresden. This seemed wrong, this was too far west and Dracula, he knew somehow, even in this state, should not encroach on this territory. He shied away from the road to Berlin, turned back east, crossed into Poland. The villages grew smaller; he let himself be waylaid. It eased the pressure to make a decision as he could not say to where he was headed. He just rode on, thinking of Russia and the north but not exactly believing he would ever come to those places. 

He didn’t. He came to Warsaw, once again found he knew the place. There were Jews there in Warsaw, not his religion if indeed he had one at all, though he carried the symbols. He buried the box there, in the grounds of a synagogue, past midnight. By morning, he’d left the city. 

The road was long; he stayed off the beaten path and avoided conversation wherever possible. As far as he knew he’d never been a social man and he grew even less so then, had been proving so since those last few days following their return from Dracula’s castle. He didn’t learn the date until he came once again to Vienna and by then he almost believed that he’d miss their meeting; hard riding brought him down to Udine, Venice, Bologna, in just a few days. Florence was next, then the roads, the familiar roads of the Italian west coast that brought him down toward Rome. He hadn’t expected to arrive there early. He _was_ early. 

Three days in an inn outside the city, not venturing in, barely leaving his small, rented room. Then, on the fourth day, he came there at last. He hadn’t been the last to arrive at the café – that was Abraham, who he suspected of a propensity toward the grand entrance. He’d sat in virtual silence as Carl began to blather about life in the monastery, waiting. And then his brother, though that term still seemed foreign, had arrived. 

Abraham, he thought, looked haggard. He seemed older now, older by years in truth, with much of the vitality gone from those once vivid, lively blue eyes. Three months and he’d grown old, whereas Carl had not changed in any particular. He seemed almost like a different man, except for moments, flashes in which there was something familiar. Gabriel couldn’t say that he understood. Not quite yet. 

The owner and the staff began to clear away the cups and Gabriel wondered if this visit hadn’t been just to ascertain that they were each still living. Abraham lifted his hat from his lap, patting it down onto his brow, and shuffled back his chair; Gabriel frowned. After everything, this was the end? This wasn’t as he’d expected. And as Abraham looked down at him, the realisation dawned. 

“You’re leaving,” he said, and he didn’t mean just from the café. 

Abraham gave a brief nod, a tired smile. “I am,” he said. “I thought when this was over that you might come with me. But I see that you won’t, will you. So I’ll go alone.” 

Carl glanced between them, obviously bewildered. Gabriel ignored him, feeling no less bewilderment. “But I have questions.”

“And you’ll find the answers, I don’t doubt that. But not from me.” Carl moved as if to speak; both Van Helsings stopped him. “I’m tired, Gabriel. I’ve been tired for a long, long time now. It’s time for me to get some rest, now that it’s all done with.”

For a moment they sat in an awkward silence, the three of them, until Gabriel gave a brief nod. He couldn’t say he understood but he believed. Abraham was exhausted, that he could see. And he’d go away, to rest, to die? He didn’t know, perhaps neither did the man himself.

They stood, Carl still on the verge of voicing a question, that was clear, but he kept himself from it with uncharacteristic fortitude. Perhaps those months had changed him in a way less than visible, or perhaps Gabriel’s look of disapproval had been enough to keep him to silence. Gabriel suspected that he’d find out which it was in the fullness of time. 

Then they left, all together, the café staff cleaning busily behind them. They stopped just a few paces from the door and Abraham turned. He and Carl said their goodbyes in Latin, which brought a smile to the friar’s face, and then the older man moved close to Gabriel. 

“I will miss you, my brother,” he said, in that unidentifiable accent. Gabriel wondered briefly if he’d ever sounded the same himself and then nodded his acknowledgement as Abraham clapped him on the shoulders, leant in by his ear. “If you should ever need me, and by no means for a trivial matter, you can follow the map.”

“The map?”

Abraham’s eyes sparkled with a little of that familiar wickedness. “The map with no names,” he whispered. “It was meant for you. With Frau Kurtz’s address, that was a mistake.”

“It has no names,” Gabriel said. “How…?”

Another moment of sparkle. “Your earliest memory is a good place to start.” He smiled and drew back, tapped down his hat. 

“Masada.” 

Abraham nodded and with that, he was gone. He turned and walked away, now just an old man on the piazza, merging with the tourists until he faded from sight. Gabriel sighed. So, this was the end… still not what he had expected. Evidently it did not quite meet Carl’s expectation, either, and as he began to walk away, Carl made this very clear. 

“So, that’s it?” he asked, following. “No questions? Don’t you want to know who you are?”

Gabriel gave a vague shrug. “He wouldn’t tell me if I asked.”

“And you’re happy with that?”

Gabriel turned, stopped, looked at Carl for a moment. “Yes, I am,” he said. “I’ll find out.”

They walked on, side by side, in uncharacteristic silence. He walked Carl to the Vatican and there they parted, Carl pausing to pull a letter from his cloak that turned out to be a summons to Jinette, for the following morning. Gabriel took it, gave it a wry smile and tucked it into his coat. 

“He said you were immortal,” Carl said before he turned away. Gabriel knew that he didn’t mean he’d heard it from Jinette. “Do you think that’s true?” But he didn’t wait for an answer, just shuffled away, back toward the labs. Gabriel was pleased; he’d had no answer to give. He watched Carl leave and then walked away himself. 

The sky was darkening as he made his way down to the hotel; he buckled up his coat as he walked, turning Carl’s question over in his mind. A few months earlier, there would not have been a doubt in his mind – no such thing as immortality existed. But now? Now he could not be nearly so sure. He’d seen immortality, he had seen Dracula and seen Dorian. But it occurred to him also, as he stepped into the hotel, asked for his room, found it was free, that both men were made immortal by means that had damned them. Were he immortal himself, would he also be damned? He had no answers. 

He let himself into the room with the small silver key, locked the door behind him and sat down on the bed. He slipped off his coat, pulled off his boots, slung his heavy waistcoat over the nearest chair and lit the lamp beside the pillows. He pulled the book from his coat and sprawled on the bed, opened it at his marked page and began to read. The book he’d bought in Florence, on a whim, Dante’s _Paradiso_. This was the same room they’d shared, all those weeks ago. It seemed fitting. Reading Dante reminded him of Dorian Gray, of the mornings in the castle that he’d tried to suppress and yet now remembered with inexplicable fondness. Dorian Gray who’d saved him. Dorian who’d saved them all, not so very traitorous in the end. Dorian who seemed to know him, who might have the answers he’d sought for so long. 

He never really had time to read, as men of action rarely seem to. He enjoyed Italian, enjoyed Dante, wondered if Dorian had made it this far in the trilogy. He wondered as he lay there, reading, if he really had to work, if he owed it to the Church the way they seemed to think he did, if he couldn’t take some time and do what it was _he_ wanted. It was a pleasant thought but not quite serious. Perhaps Abraham could rest, but Gabriel could not. He had obligations. He _wanted_ to fulfill them. Perhaps no one else could. 

But as he lay there, his mind still turned. He thought maybe if he ever had the time, he’d learn to paint. And then… then he’d take the book to Dorian.


End file.
